I found this on digg today. It’s a little guide to tweak windows XP so that the kernel is always running in memory, and a few other little fixes to do things with memory management.
I just read the thread about it, and I think I’m pretty dubious about it. I haven’t actually tried it, and I don’t think I want to. Some time ago, I used to fiddle with these little registry hacks and things, but they really didn’t do anything for me. Usually the best they could do was cause the PC to fall over constantly, or make other odd and random things happen. I just want to get on and use my PC. I don’t want to be resurrecting it every five minutes.
My argument against these sorts of tweaks these days is that if they actually did do something wonderful, surely they would be enabled anyway? Microsoft are constantly derided for making poorly-performing software, so their programmers and testers are going to try and do the best they can with the code to make it behave the best they can. If there’s a feature to make things run much better, and it does work, it’ll be enabled by default. Sure, there’s going to be other optimisations in there, but they are most likely to be disabled because they either don’t work at all, or cause instabilities. If these things are hidden or undocumented, they are that way for a reason. Disabling them isn’t going to do anything.
Tweaking an OS in this way is akin to overclocking the hardware. It’s a false economy, but very few people ever really understand this. These days I’m more into best practices than hacking Windows about to do something it really shouldn’t do. I suppose what galls me the most is when people apply these tweaks, then complain when their system doesn’t work properly.
Incidentally these are usually the same people who reinstall Windows every couple of weeks. Their choice I suppose, but I’ve got better things to be occupying my time with!