Oh okay, I never knew that. Thanks for your help, along with every body else's here.

I dont think adding more memory would speed up the machine, it also depends on the OS that you use, plus practice defragging at least once a week, you can also add video card. I am using a 40G memory with XP, so far I can open yahoo messenger and JSH at a time

I defraggment most every few days or daily at most.

I am pretty sure I have a video card and that wouldn't make much of a differences as far as I know of.

cleaning adware/spyware

more memory, video card & some tweaking & etc will make it considerably faster

I run adware / spyware every day if not every other day.

I guess some more memory will help, not sure about the video card thing since I probably have one but not for sure.

Thanks for your reply.

Not sure I get the whole virtual memory (swap memory) suggestion. Ram is always faster than your hard drive.

Loading a great deal of drivers, resident software, desktop backgrounds, cursors, screen savers, anti-virus/antispam, etc makes your PC run much slower. A cluttered registry, or one with invalid entries can drastically effect both boot and post boot speed. Get RegClean first.

Also pick up autoruns at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx if you are technically proficient enough to determine which files, drivers, services and BHOs you want to enable or disable. What services are loaded and initialized is a huge drag on all Windows platforms. AutoRunS will allow you to disable unused items in many areas including the registry, BHOs, ActiveX or other controls, application specific DLLS...lots. Just understand what you kill before you do it.


You can optimize your swap file manually through the Computer management console if you know how, and this will help a lot. Also fixing the size of the swap file rather than letting it dynamically resize on demand is a speed up booster from boot to shut down.

No matter how much memory you get, boot time will always be slow if you have lots of startup items and therefore processes/threads. Memory alone is not likely to fix a slow boot at all unless you are critically low on RAM or swap file space. And I already mentioned optimizing that.


Some may disagree with me, but I'm a systems programmer as well as a hardware tech for 36 years and I say that if you are running Windows XP any version, any RAM greater than 1Gb gives diminished returns. This does not apply to multi-processor systems running Win Server anything.

So..I'm done. Good luck.

Interesting. In my experience, registry cleaners are crap that do more harm than good. "Snake Oil" I believe is the appropriate term. Far more effective to simply run msconfig and eliminate unneeded items there and then set any automatic processes tied to those items to manual so that they never start again.

A 40Gig swap file? XP is capped at 3.5 Gigs of physical ram unless you're running 64-bit...

Doesn't this refer to the slots for expansion slots, not the memory?

Yes, those do refer to the bus, not the RAM.

I guess you need to study a bit more then. I don't sell snake oil. You could use msconfig to alter your startup items and thats the first thing to do...clean the startup. But there are only a few sections in the registry that msconfig looks at. Mainly HKLM and HKCU\software\microsoft\windows\current version\run...runonce and a few more. Take a look at your registry with regedit and realize that there are probably hundreds of thousands of lines in there. And every single piece of software that you ever used will have entried in CLASSES and many other places. Cleaning yor registry WILL help...if you know what you're doing. I personally manually edit the registry to clean it but recommended regclean because, while it too only looks at several sections, it requires zero knowledge. Apparently a good trait around here. lol

...and...your registry is a huge database that Windows looks at every time it starts and uses all the time it's running. The smaller the data, the shorter the time it takes for Win to navigate.

And your MCSE is in what exactly? Sorry, pretentious ****s piss me off. And somebody who has "zero knowledge", as you put it, is the last person I would want to use any sort of registry cleaner, since they can and often do more damage by removing needed entries as well as unneeded ones with agressive scanning. And anybody who does recommend them usually also recommends backing up the registry before using one. (A restore point prior to the clean is also good.)

And REGCLEAN hasn't really been a good one to use since 95/98. The registry structure has changed a lot since XP came out. If it's working for you so far, that's great. Doesn't mean it will work for everybody.

And FWIW, there are no documented performance tests for any registry cleaner out there. They have their uses, but speeding up your system isn't one of them, IMO.

Clean up your computer. Try doing a scandisk, Defrag, and close down all start up programs if you are running XP; you don't have to have anything turned on in startup.
The thing with memory is that you need to find out how much your motherboard can handle before wasting money on some that won't work if your board is maxed.
And yes, get a good reg cleaning program. If you have installed and uninstalled programs they tend to leave behind files that you no longer need. So these files tend to slow down performance.
There are sites out there that will tell you what is going on inside your computer. I use "pc pitstop" when there is a problem that I am unable to figure out.
One other thing some forget to do is Blow your computer out, yes dust can make a system run hot which also will affect performance. You can pick a can up for around five dollars. Make sure not to tilt the can or even shake it. This can cause a mist which is bad, and if you decide to blow your computer out. Make sure you unplug the power cord.

Yes they have been proven to benefit a computers performance. Then as you have also mentioned; if one does not know what to do when using a registry edit program, back up the registry first. And there is one that I use after doing research and finding it proven to do the best job, and even recommended though a few of Microsoft’s Techs.