Ziff Davis / PC Magazine have periodically published extracts from the book Hacking Windows, published by Wiley.

The recent article Speed Up Your Boot may be of interest for those who feel they're really having problems with WinXP startup speed.

There are links at the beginning of the article to separate chapters on:

Speeding Disk Access

and

Speeding up network and internet access

The article on speeding up boot suggests a couple of things that are possibly questionable, especially if you rely on outside service persons for help with your machine, since they can introduce some "unexpected" behaviours that may make normal recovery procedures fail. Make notes, and/or discuss the changes with your "techie" before diving in too deep. You may otherwise encounter the problem paying your tech to fix something you changed on purpose. If your tech finds a machine that won't boot to his/her diagnostic disks, (s)he may assume that's the problem instead of knowing that you disabled boot from the "normal" drives and really do have another problem.

A comment made here may indirectly explain some slow operation in a laptop that's used intermittently, although the effect would be small. The "boot files" are not cleaned up by normal drive defrag. WinXP instead relies on a separate utility that runs automatically during machine "idle time." If the machine is never turned on and idle, the boot files can become both fragmented and splattered around on the disk. While this mainly affects boot, "unmovable" files that are fragmented and dispersed could prevent normal defrag of the rest of the disk from doing efficient cleanup. An interesting description, even though it's probably of marginal help.

The article on speeding up disk access deals largely with using the "Intel Accelerator," which is a separate program you can download and install that, it is claimed, does work – in certain cases. Very specific instructions are given for determining whether it will work on your machine, and must be followed exactly. The "Accelerator" can be used only if you have an Intel processor and certain specific BIOS/motherboard chipset combinations. Prior installation of other utilities may be required. It is advised that inappropriate use can completely disable your machine. But it works well when used in appropriate cases(?). Note the requirement to use the "old version" for laptops.

Unfortunately, as noted in the article, the "Accelerator" has not been certified for use with WinXP SR2, so you are "at risk" if you use it there, although the author "thinks it's okay." Intel may have more recent advise on this, and you should get the Accelerator from them if it looks like it might help. DO NOT GET IT FROM A WEB POPUP! 'nuff said.

Additional hacks to change Pagefile size and use are included. These are applicable to any machine running WinXP, but "thoughtful usage" is recommended. It's possible that they might be helpful for a machine that's just "overall slow," particularly for a machine with "not quite WinXP specs."

Usefulness of the chapter on speeding up web/internet access depends on what kind of connection you use, so you'll have to make your own determination of what might help. Parts of the procedures rely on freeware that I haven't used and can't advise about. Microsoft advice on the TCP/IP settings that the article suggests changing is generally to accept the defaults; but they do admit that changes sometimes may be needed to solve specific problems. The author may be making a common "techwriting error" by assuming a particular setup that he doesn't bother to define, so there is the possibility that the changes he suggests could affect other things he doesn't know you have such as LAN/peripheral network connections, ICS, etc. You should be able to tell if something will be a problem with your setup, if you think about it a bit, so I won't recommend extreme paranoia. If you're a "very ordinary user" you're probably fairly safe with his recommendations.

None of this is of much interest unless you have a real problem with machine speed with WinXP on your machine. I would advise against doing most of the things recommended except where you can confirm that they're needed, but there are circumstances where they might be justified, and it doesn't hurt to know what's available.

Remember the mantra of the airplane shops: "If it ain't broke I ain't worked on it yet." The double meaning is implicit.

John