Saving money with your computer at home
The power requirements of the modern desktop PC have jumped to astronomical levels. Rigs sporting multiple processing cores and graphics cards and multiple hard drives require more juice than previous generations of hardware did. Some high-end power supply units are now rated in excess of 1,200 watts. A modern computer enthusiast’s gaming rig, including monitor, might pull as much as 400 watts just idling. Leaving a computer on all the time can translate into a pretty hefty power bill at the end of the month. An “always on” 400 watts at a $0.12-per-kilowatt-hour rate would cost you $34.56 a month! When talking these kinds of figures, it’s easy to see how taking the time to configure a proper power-saving state for your PC could save you some serious cabbage. Click here to download the PDF to Maximum PCs article excerpt: pc2sleep.pdf
Disable XP Loading Screen
For those of us who want to squeeze out a little more from our Windows XP startup:
To speed up your boot process slightly, disable the Windows XP loading screen. This can be accomplished easily by opening the MSCONFIG utility (’start\run and type msconfig’), selecting the ‘boot.ini’ tab and checking the /NOGUIBOOT option.
When you boot your system, you will see a black screen in between POST and the welcome screen from now on.
Swap File Tweak
Another memory tweak…
For Users with 256 MB RAM or more this tweak will boost their Windows- and Game-Performance.
What it does: It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left.
Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add “ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1″ under the 386enh section.
Restart your Windows and enjoy better Game performance
Memory Tweaking for Windows XP
I work on a lot of PCs at work and during my copious freetime for friends and families. I have come across a few tweaks that I have noticed that make a pretty good difference without investing much other than a few minutes of your time. Try them out and let me know what you think.
These Settings will fine tune your systems memory management –at least 256MB of ram recommended
go to start\run\regedit -and then to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
DisablePagingExecutive -double click it and in the decimal put a 1 - this allows XP to keep data in memory now instead of paging sections of ram to hard drive yields faster performance.
LargeSystemCache- double click it and change the decimal to 1 -this allows XP Kernal to Run in memory improves system performance a lot.
Create a new dword and name it IOPageLockLimit - double click it and set the value in hex - 4000 if you have 128MB of ram or set it to 10000 if you have 256MB set it to 40000 if you have more than 512MB of ram -this tweak will speed up your disc cache
Reboot and watch your system fly!
