The Windows XP Thread

 My PC is getting on a bit now so I have been messing around with some tweaks.

 I have used http://tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks1.htm

 and

 http://clankiller.com/technical/tweaks/winxp/fstweaks.php

 plus a couple of others I found through using google. There are loads out there

 Also have overclocked my CPU about 10% or so, using this guide

 http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1804.

 I found these guides really easy to follow and they explained everthing as I went along.

 
I seriously cannot believe how much crap XP runs that it doesn't need, and how many things can be done to improve performance! Reckon I have spent about 5 hours doing all this so far but I have had amazing improvement in the way everything runs. Still tidying up things here and there. Have had a few scares where things didn't boot up, mainly by ramping up the CPU and voltage too much, but if you follow these guides you shouldn't have too much trouble.

 Thought I would share these with the massive. Good luck if you wanna have a go.

 PS- all mac related posts will be deleted 

 

 

 

 

I got nothing then.

 

 

http://www.musicxp.net/index.php has some good stuff

Running a prog called Crap Cleaner regularly also helps to clean out files and shit bloating your system. It will delete your history etc. so if you want to keep these uncheck them...

 I think I have done almost every possible tweak now. Can't find anything new

What about this?

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 Mac's are overrated. I don't need one for what I do. Next

securemaker

i used to run my old pc severely overclocked.... shortened the lifespan of it considerably however..


oh and screw macs-
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UBUNTU 7.10 out this Thursday - w00t

MAC's are good....

PC's are good......

                      . . . . ........neither are better. They both do stuff.

if only it ran production software/games... sigh

and stryke, make sure your computer is clean on the inside.  Dust will rapidly build up hot spots.  May be worth putting a bigger/extra fan if your case is old too...  i had my old p4 20% o/clocked for a year and never a temperature issue.  Got rid of it for dual core bout 18 months ago so havent clocked it yet

its out already...

http://www.filearena.net/dir.php?ubuntu-releases/gutsy
boom!

Tweaking XP I don't have a problem with, but I generally don't recommend overclocking...

Sure most of the time the gear runs just fine when you overclock it by 5, 10, or 20% (or whatever) but you do definitely shorten the lifespan. If you are a regular visitor to any overclocking related forums it's pretty obvious that if you overclock components they simply won't last as long. That is regardless of whether or not you are using extra cooling equipment...

That said, often the best "tweak" you can give a Windows system is to do a fresh install.

I don't bother tweaking or overclocking my PC anymore. I used to O/C my CPUs by raising the FSB, but then I'd get to a stage where my memory wouldn't keep up. Sure, I could have bought something faster, but then I'm better off getting a faster CPU, etc.

Windows blows - I am so over having to reinstall my OS to regain performance and functionality.

Oh yeah, and get a Mac up ya. 

Nice one Bezz but that's a release candidate (RC in filename). Actual testing finishes today or tomorrow or sumthin. They always put last minute fixes in.

Cant wait tho !

Also, Internode cache Ubuntu locally.

If your a Node customer its also FREE DATA - w00t

Get it here when it's released - http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/

does yours even look like that?  ive only seen osx loaded when im there playing with it.  no point mackin it when you run windows haha

I've been running both since you put parallels on.

What do you use Parallels for? I mean, what apps specifically require you to use it?

excellent!

It means I can use the mac side of things for pretty much all my internet related stuff, but still have windows going for my design stuff as all my plug ins etc for photoshop are all windows based.

Means I dont need to continually switch between operating systems. Have both up & running at the same time.
Best of both worlds.

Fair enough.

I run a Mac as primary system as well and use XP inside VMWare Fusion (same thing as parallels basically) but only for 1 application (a disc cataloging program because I can't be bothered re-cataloging 300+ discs).

yeah parallels (haven't bothered installing fusion yet, probably won't unless i get bored enough as parallels is sufficient) is great.......... in that i've never been more impressed or excited by software that i never actually use.... i did my tax return in etax, occasionally restore ipods for windows and have lost about $60 playing on pokerstars... so really having windows installed is only costing me money

still, it's nice having the task bar just sorta sitting there under the dock, great little geekazoid power trip 

looks like you've got a few posts to delete spank

More like they're underrated 

Still, thank god for windows PCs. Without them I wouldn't earn a living.

Windows is good for the economy in the same way that natural disasters are - they both generate lots of economic activity relating to fixing broken stuff...

 I agree that Windows is a bloated piece of crap but I still don't really need a Mac for what I use, atm it's pretty much just gaming, net, torrents and mp3's.

 But, once you know what you are doing and take a bit of time to trim the unnecessary processes you can get Xp running pretty sweetly.

 That was the idea of this thread I guess.

i have no need for a mac.. i need xp for all my uni programs, games and whatnot. This holidays I'm gonna put ubuntu back on another partition- much better than any mac i've used.

oh and also, rant to windows vista... no support at all for my netgear wireless card, and netgear aren't producing any drivers for it. And yet it worked with ubuntu straight out of the box with the native drivers?

Vista is hideous. Seriously, when a new OS comes out I expect it to have better features, more stable and possibly even faster than the previous. It fails on all counts.

Yes I'm a fan of Linux, but not a fan of app lackage. For me it has its place: on servers. I know all the major benefits and the cost can't be beat. I remember when it was l33t to build Wolf3d or Doom on Slackware, but really can't be arsed these days.
My fave bizzo is VMware ESX - We run our virtual Win2003 servers on it. 

So for the next 5 years (or whenever) until microsoft release their next OS - I'm stuck with XP on my PC - or even longer if/when they fuck that up also. XP does all I need it to.

Yes I reckon Vista is a piece of shit. Its fine until you want to do something like change a setting, network to another OS, set up IP addresses etc. All the advanced settings are hidden in obscure places, it's as if they don't want you to know they exist. And it's slow. And it hardly does anything new. Whats the fucking point of it then?


I just cleaned my pc. It's running sweet. I've got one problem tho - my bios keeps reverting to running at 1.79 GHz instead of 2.4, unless I go in and change it back every time I start up. Any thoughts? Maybe I need to replace a battery?

 Well after bignoting Windows recently it seems my DVD/CD  Drive/s have disappeared from my bios and the edge of the world.

 Just took the case apart then and everything seems to be plugged in firmly. Have tried a few other fixes as well but no luck.

 I have no idea.

 Not too bother I don't really use them tbh

definitely sounds like battery to me

If one drive has disappeared then it is probably fucked.

If 2 drives at the same time then a cable is probably unplugged or maybe power problem. Possibly Main Board damage.

What type of drives are u running? SATA or IDE?

Newer SATA drives have several controller chip modes which may make drives disappear of the map if the BIOS info is wiped or you tweaked something u shouldn't have.

Tell us your mobo model no. and we can go from there.

If they're IDE drives then make sure your jumpers are configured for Master/Slave properly and switch power plugs to make sure its not power related. Sometimes pins inside the Molex connector can come loose, so try a diff plug.

One drive disappearing is almost always a hardware fault. Two is usually always cabling/bios settings. Check your IDE cable for nicks/cuts as well.

If he didn't touch anything and BIOS hasn't been changed, I assume the drive is dead. They're cheap as anyway to replace

If the CMOS battery has gone flat then the BIOS settings are lost also. Unlikely but it does happen. Not a prob, it's a $6 fix with a CR-2032 battery from any jeweler or watch maker.


Don't blame Windows, if the drive doesn't appear in the BIOS it won't appear in Windows, the problem exists before it even boots.

So it's dead drive, faulty cable or BIOS battery most likely. But the complaint is loss of multiple drives in BIOS. If nothings been touched it might be your power supply has fukt up and blown drives.

Firstly, be sure its not the cable. Then try putting one of the drives into a usb enclosure or another PC, that will set you in the right direction.

 both drives are back working today. 

Doh!

 

 I have no idea hey, short of updating the drivers.

 They come and go a bit

 Now my external HDD, which is 5 months old and has only been moved between rooms here, is totally not working either . The LED lights up, it whirs but I cannot get it up on the pc.

 Its not registering under disk management so it's not a Drive Letter issue. I am at a loss after 4 or 5 hours on google.

 FOR FUCKS FUCKING SAKE CAN A I CATCH A FUCKING BREAK

i did have an issue with virtual drive software and usb flash drives not showing on my pc, uninstalled and made a registry fix to solve it.  I doubt its a related to your hard drive prob, worth a mention tho

 Nah that could be it actually.

 Uninstalled Magic ISO the other day. Any idea what you did?

no, sorry, just googled it and a few different things came up, cant remember which i did...

I used to be able to access the drive it through admin tools>computer management>disk management. The drive would show up unassigned & i could access it by right clicking and going open or explore.  I eventually got sick of this and the registry fix solved it permanently, although i need to reverse it if i want to run alcohol120% again...

if ya cant find it let me know, ill have another look

Disks only appear in Disk Management unallocated if they are missing a Partition Table or use a different filesystem (like HFS or Ext3 or the like).

MagicISO will definitely NOT cause this, so it may be your drive is faulty. I suggest 2 things.

1st - Listen very closely to the drive, if it's making ticking noises when not being accessed (not normal access noise) or a heavier grinding-type noise then your drives rooted.

2nd - If the enclosure can be taken apart easily, do it and look over the circuit board (enclosures circuit board as well as drives own board)for burnt out part. Sometime a transistor or capacitor can blow and stop the drive from functioning. Also if you can take it out attach the drive to a different PC or enclosure.


edit: oh and a quicker way to access Disk Management is to right click My Computer icon on desktop and select "manage".

Well i guarantee that alcohol did on mine 

still cant find it, sorry spanks

All I saw was the words tweaking Xp and clicked on the thread title. 

Now Ive read this thread its far too complicated for this blonde

Alcohol is different it uses Virtual SCSI drivers, the latest incarnation uses the StarWind iSCSI driver. It is the removal of this virtual device which has probably caused your issues.... this is fixable with some REG hacking

 I opened up the case the other night but had no idea what i was looking for.

 Also tried to connect it internally but I must need some sort of adaptor cos the plugs were all wrong.

 It' still under warranty but I cant find the receipt

no, its not about Xpress

Is this a Serial ATA (SATA) or IDE drive?

I can sort you out with an adapter if you really want to try it in another machine....

Your generally only looking for burn marks on the board where components have blown, it will be fairly obvious most of the time.

ah ha, no worries... 

  yeh i know dat 

 No burn marks or anything. have tried it with a couple of different cords on another machine.

 Pretty much at a loss now. I currently have 180 gig of HDD space unusable in total. Its killing me.

 Gay

Hell ghey.....

Erm, PM me if your having mega hassles fella, can sort u out somehow.

I don't understand why people have so many problems with their PC's, what do you do with them. I've had my current machine for over 2 years and never had to do a windows re-install, never had it crash on me or seen a blue screen of death and my machine is on 24 hours a day.

I have Diskeeper and Spybot setup to run automatically overnight to keep my HD's defragged and get rid of nasties. I also do a disk cleanup about once a week but that's it.

I've never overclocked my PC and my performance is the same now as it was when I bought the machine, only problem is my graphics card is getting a bit old now to run the latest games.

I'm sticking with XP too cos I hate Vista. I use windows blinds so that it looks like Vista anyway but doesn't hog all my memory. I wan't to get a Mac one day when I have the spare cash but I will always have a PC as well.

Well Clever, not everyones as Clever as you...

But seriously, i'm in I.T., used to be in retail as a store technician, and you wouldn't believe what people do to their PC's. I've seen it all. 3 antivirus programs all competing on the same machine.... I think our store record for virus infections was 15,000 infected items (young guy been surfing gay porn no protection). I've seen ppl build their own machines when they have no idea how. Not to mention the various crap versions of XP circulating out there that don't even contain the right system files. If there's a way to fuck it up ppl will find it.....

If you don't know how to build a PC properly - DON'T

BUY WINDOWS IF U CAN - yes i actually said that! (It's only $120 now anyway) At least you can get updates and it's got the right stuff to begin with.

Only tweak if you know the impact on your system (disabling print services doesnt help if you have a printer, yeh....)


Other than that, Windows PC's don't work well if theyre not maintained. You would drive a car without putting in petrol, oil and water and getting a service/new tires every now and then so don't expect your PC to function without the odd DEFRAG/UPDATES/VIRUS SCAN.

If you are doing these things - now would be a good time to start.

I smell burning! - yeehaa looks like my AMD Socket-A may be finally coming to an end

Its been a decent PC for the last 4 years running 24/7 without any upgrades, other than a new power supply and more hard drives

 


Bugger, I'm forced to shutdown and use my Mac instead 

Does that mean u cant post in this thread any more? 

It turned out to be my power supply, which is a 2month old fucking Antec 450w. I had always thought of Antec to be a decent brand. It tastes like burning.

Apart from the obvious sign of getting as hot as a cunt, I checked voltages in the BIOS and it was completely missing the -5V rail 

ive had 3 antec psu's in my pc in the last 18 months. First one was DOA, second one burnt out after a few months, 3rd time lucky is going strong.
First 2 were Smartpower 2.0 500w, current one is Earthwatts 500w. At least they have a decent warranty on em!

Yeah the one I had that died was a Smartpower. Anything from fucking Leader fails quick

wow.

this thread is about as geek as it gets

geek Slang.
–noun 2. a computer expert or enthusiast

I'm likable 

there are multiple meanings

one, and most common I have found, is to be really good at computers innit

haha all of mine were from leader.. sounds as if the smartpower ones were dud. They were pulled from the market the second time i went back...

Well the fucking cheap bastards replaced my 450w Smartpower with a 500w Basiq. Not too happy, even though there is a 'slight' power increase. I'm gonna send it back and demand at least an Earthpower. The Basiq doesn't have an many Molex power connectors meaning I have to use a bunch of Y-splitters to power 5 hard drives.

Big fucking wah to svchost randomly chugging 99% CPU and PC becoming non responsive because of this gay phenomena.

CBF working out why, time for another reinstall me thinks. Fuck you Windows!

I've got a problem with my incoming connections at the moment. Using both utorrent and soulseek my dload speed has been reduced severely, and i can't even get up any search results on soulseek anymore. I don't recall changing any settings, and i have upnp installed and  have correctly forwarded ports on my router. The whole thing worked great up until a few weeks back. The problem seems to be only on my pc as no one else on the network is effected (damn you roost). Anyone have any suggestions?

Do a netstat from the cmd-line and see if theres many open connections (without any interweb apps open)

couldnt find the problem in the end so i'm just gonna do a reinstall when i can be bothered... PC is booting real slow at the moment.

Also, I'm after a decent Spam Filter for outlook express for a friend of mine. All of the ones I've found have only been trial versions. They're using Avast as their antivirus, but that only has a virus scanner for email and not a spam blocker per se. Anyone got any decent programs?

I keep getting a "generic host process for win32 services error" thing and I get kicked off the net and my sound card stops working.

Then XP slows down a bit and goes from XP theme to Classic theme and back to XP theme again.

Only happens when I use the net but it always happens.
Then I gotta reboot.
 

I am thinking fresh install but it IS a fairly fresh install.
Maybe a windows repair?

u may be tryin to run a 64 bit browser on a 32 bit system
if u downloaded the wrong firefox

I don't think so but I'll check when I get home.

Cheers
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