Windows XP memory adjustment wizard

Windows XP memory adjustment wizard

Author: .com.cn

Compared with Windows 9x, although Windows 2000/XP provides a better memory management mechanism, you need more memory to make them run smoothly and more efficiently. This article will guide you to securely adjust and adjust your software settings so that your system can run better with limited memory (including physical memory and paging files. Note: This document is based on Windows XP Professional. Some of these features can be reflected in other operating systems. In addition, you 'd better use administrator or an account with the same permissions to log on.

Software Upgrade

The most important thing is to keep your software up-to-date, which not only solves some software security problems, but also solves some design errors. For example, if some programs are not completed during writing and the results may cause serious memory leakage after running, a long period of running such software will seriously affect the normal operation of the system. Therefore, the proper solution is regular upgrades. For Windows systems, you can directly access the Windows Update Website for updates and upgrades. For other software, you need to pay attention to the web pages of software vendors.

In terms of hardware, we should always pay attention to the updates of various drivers. Generally, new drivers will increase the working efficiency of hardware devices more or less. In order to find hardware updates, we recommend that you go to the driver's home, you can also subscribe to a driver's upgrade reminder. In this way, as long as the subscribed driver has updates, you will receive an email from the driver's home reminding you to pay attention.

Hard Disk Adjustment

To ensure that the memory subsystem works in the optimal state, it is also necessary to adjust the hard disk properly, because paging files are stored on the hard disk, and paging files will seriously affect the memory performance.

At the same time, press the Windows key and the pause break key to open the System Properties dialog box, open the Device Manager under the hardware tab, click the plus sign in front of the disk drive, expand the disk drive option, and double-click your hard drive icon, then, select Enable write cache on the disk under the Policy tab. This will greatly improve the I/O performance of the hard disk. Please note that this is for IDE Hard Disk settings. If you are using a SCSI hard disk, you will not see these options.

Next, you should be sure that all your ide devices have enabled DMA (directly memory access for Direct Memory reading ). Expand the ide ata/atapi controller in the Device Manager and double-click the primary/secondary ide channel. On the Advanced Settings tab, change the transmission mode of all devices to DMA.

The third concern is the selection of the device type. In Windows XP, the device types of all ide channels are set to automatic detection by default. This setting will enable the system to spend a lot of time exploring all ide channels at startup. Therefore, it is wise to set the device type of the idle ide channel to none, so that the system startup speed can be improved a lot. Note that only idle ide ports can be set in this way.

Transfer Mode. If available, the optimal transmission mode of the IDE device should be DMA, unless you are using an older ide device, it is best to set it like this. For devices that cannot use the IDE mode, they can only be set to Pio.

Configure startup and fault recovery options

By default, if a serious error occurs in the system, a large amount of data in the memory will be dumped so that the administrator can troubleshoot the error based on the data. However, this feature is useless for our general users, but it wastes valuable hard disk space. Therefore, the first thing after installing the system is to disable system dumping.

On the Advanced tab of System Properties, click Start and fault recovery settings to open a new window. Under the system failure configuration item, cancel the selection of writing events to system logs, sending management alarms, and automatic restart, and select "NONE" under the drop-down menu for writing debugging information ". With this setting, the system can be prevented from doing a lot of useless work.

In the drop-down menu for writing debugging information, we can see four different options, which occupy different amounts of hard disk space to save data:

None. This will not write any information when an error occurs. This option will not write any data during system crash and will not occupy hard disk space.

Small memory dump (64 K), this option will write the minimum number of dump information when the system crashes, it will basically occupy about 2 MB of hard disk space.

Core Memory Dump. This option will dump all core memory when the system crashes, which occupies about 50 MB of hard disk space.

Full memory dump. This option will dump all the memory when the system crashes, which will consume as much space as the physical memory to save data.

Advanced performance options

On the "advanced" tab of System Properties, click the "Performance Settings" button to open the "performance options" window. On the "advanced" tab of the "performance options" tab, we can see Figure 4.

Processor plan. This setting determines how the CPU allocates the working time in each process. If it is set to a program, the CPU time will be more applications on the foreground running programs, such as games, ie, word, and so on; if it is set to a background service, the CPU time is evenly allocated to all running processes. Therefore, if your machine is not used as a server, you 'd better set it as a program.

Memory usage. If this parameter is set to system cache, Windows uses all the system memory except 4 MB as the file system cache. If your computer has a large amount of memory (at least 256 MB), you should set it as the system cache here, which will greatly improve the system performance; if your memory is less than 256 MB, you 'd better set it to a program.

Registry Settings

Speaking of Windows, it seems that the Registry is inevitable. Yes, your system will run more smoothly and quickly after reasonable changes to the registry. However, improper changes to the registry may cause serious system problems. Therefore, before making changes, it is best to clarify the consequences of your operations. Also, creating a restore point through system restoration is a good measure.

Enter Regedit in the running state, press enter, open the Registry Editor, and expand the Registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/system/CurrentControlSet/control/sessionmanager/memory management. Here you can make the following changes:

Clearpagefileatshutdown (clear paging files when shutdown). It is recommended that you do not change this item, that is, keep the default value 0. Of course, you can also set it to 1, but this will take a lot of time to delete paging files when the system is disabled. This directly slows down shutdown. Some friends may find that the shutdown speed is much slower after they use optimization software such as Windows optimization masters or super rabbits. Then, you should check whether you accidentally set to delete paging files. Of course, this setting is not useless. For example, if you want to use ghost or drive image to make a mirror image for your system disk, you certainly don't want to keep hundreds of megabytes of paging files together. If you are using a FAT partition, you can also start the DOS boot disk and delete the paging files under DOS, however, NTFS partitions cannot do this. Therefore, if this is the case, you can delete the paging file when shutting down, and then click "lung" directly.

Disablepagingexecutive (disable memory scheduling), which is set to 0 by default. In this way, Windows keeps writing memory fragments to paging files and saving them. If your memory is large (more than MB ), you can set this item to 1 so that all data can be stored in the memory. Because the memory speed is much faster than that of paging files, this will undoubtedly improve the system performance.

Pagingfiles, which not only determines the maximum and minimum values of a paging file, but also the name of the paging file. In this way, you can name the XP paging file win386.swp. If you have installed Windows 98 and Windows XP, in this way, the same paging file/virtual memory can be shared between Windows 98 and Windows XP to save hard disk space.

Disabling POSIX and POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface, operating system interface in a portable computer environment) can provide support for IEEE interfaces on your computer. If you do not have such a device, you can disable POSIX support. The specific method is to open the Registry Editor, expand the Registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/system/CurrentControlSet/control/sessionmanager/subsystems, find and delete the optional and POSIX keys, after the computer is restarted, it will take effect. However, this change may make some of your special software unable to run normally. Therefore, it is wise to back up the two keys before deletion, in this way, if any program is found to have an error due to this operation, it can be restored as long as it is restored.

Monitor and determine the usage of paging files

Although the Windows system can manage paging files by itself, it cannot optimize the system performance. However, if you set it yourself, will it be most reasonable to do so? From other articles, you may see someone else's advice: set the size of the paging file to 1.5 or 2 times of the physical memory. However, will those that suit others be suitable for you? If you have 1 GB of memory, I am afraid it is enough, but it is calculated by 1.5 times. You even need to waste 1 GB of hard drive! In fact, as long as you follow the instructions below, you can clearly see your system's requirements for paging files, and then achieve targeted.

To determine the size of your paging file, you must first monitor the memory requirements of your system. To monitor these things, you must first set a large paging file value. Open System Properties. Under the Advanced tab, click Performance Settings. In the displayed window, select the Advanced tab and click Change, the size of the specified paging file is 512 MB (or more), and the maximum and minimum values are equal. Click Settings next to it. After the restart, the new settings take effect.

Next, start monitoring, Open Control Panel-performance and maintenance-management tools-performance, expand the Performance Logs and alarms on the left side, and click Select recorder logs, right-click in the blank area on the right panel, select new log settings, name it pagefile, and press enter to confirm. Then a window appears,

Under the General tab, click the Add recorder button. In the performance object drop-down menu of the new window, select paging file, select "select recorder from list", and then click % usage peak, select "_ total" in the example and click "add". The settings are shown in Figure 61. Close the window. You need to remember the name and storage location of the log file from the current log name. On the log files tab, set the log file type to "text files (separated by commas )".

In this way, after clicking "OK", the recorder has started to run. You can perform daily operations on your computer and open and close various frequently used applications and games as much as possible. After several hours of use, you can make a complete evaluation of your usage.

In this case, you need to stop the running of the recorder. In the log window of the recorder, select the page file recorder we created, right-click it, and choose stop. Open the log file in Notepad. The result is similar to figure 7. The following figure shows the usage of the paging file.

Note that the value in the log is not the usage of the paging file, but the usage. That is to say, according to the reality of log files, I usually only use less than 50% paging files, and the page files I set have a size of 512 MB, so in order to save hard disk space, I can reduce the maximum size of a paging file to MB. For the minimum value, you can first calculate the average usage based on the log usage, and then multiply it by the maximum value.

Set paging files

Now that you have calculated the size of the paging file you need, let's take a look at how to set it to the most reasonable. The first consideration is whether to use a fixed size paging file, that is, the initial value is equal to the maximum value. Another solution is general. The maximum value must be greater than the initial value. They have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you set a fixed size paging file, in this case, if the system or other applications cannot meet the requirements for a larger paging file, in this case, Windows forcibly adjusts the size of the paging file until the system or program needs to be satisfied. Fixed-size paging files reduce the generation of Hard Disk fragments because paging files are no longer dynamically increased or decreased. For general settings, after the paging file needs to exceed the initial value, the paging file will dynamically increase (until the maximum value is reached) to the desired size, and will automatically decrease after it is used. Therefore, for the general setting method, it is best to set the maximum value of the paging file to 2 times the initial value. However, the disadvantage of this setting is that as the size of the paging file changes, many hard disk fragments will be generated. Therefore, the specific method you choose depends on your own meaning.

Fragment of paging files

You are not mistaken. It is actually a part of a paging file. I don't know if you have never said this. During hard disk fragmentation, you will find some files that cannot be moved in the system disk. They are paging files (and other system files). These files have never been organized, so they have a great impact on performance. However, general fragment software is powerless to these files. Here we will introduce you to a free and good tool: pagedefrag, you can use it on NT/2000/XP to organize your paging files and some other system file fragments. This software is free of charge and can be downloaded to the x86 computer version here. It is green. decompress the downloaded file to a folder and double-click the executable file to run it. Because the software cannot perform dedicated access to paging files when the system is running, the sorting will be performed the next time the system is started. You can set sorting at the next startup or at each startup as needed.

Summary

Now you have mastered how to adjust the memory settings in Windows XP to make the system run more smoothly. Of course, no matter how you set it, it is better to install more memory. Therefore, try to install as much memory as possible, I hope that your use of Windows XP is a wonderful experience.