Eliminate the unnecessary services running on your PC. It is pretty easy and very important to do. I bought this laptop about a year ago. The sales person warned me that by selecting a model with only 256mb of RAM I would have to upgrade sooner or later. I didn't have the money at the time so I have been limping along by tweaking my system and being careful about what programs I have open. I have always wondered why I had so many "services" running. I was not sure what any of them did and I wished I had a list of what each one did.At this web site you can learn what all the services are doing and stop the ones that you do not need. It was a real eye opener for me!
http://web.archive.org/web/20041128084144/www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
Below I have listed some of the services I have stopped but you need to go to the site above and read through it so you understand what services are right for you to shut down. BlackViper has made it easy to look up your services. The only reason I am showing you what I shut off is so you understand what a waste some of these services are. Anyone that owns a computer and does not go through this process is waisting their resources and sharing information they might not want to. This is one of the reasons that Microsoft is criticized so heavily by those who know what the Windows OS is actually doing. There are things you do not want running on your computer and Black Viper does a very good job of helping you sort things out.
The indexing service: If you create a lot of files and directories on your computer the indexing service built into XP, and automatically turned on each time you start your computer, is probably sucking up your memory and slowing you down.
Network Location Awareness: It turns out that this service is not needed if you have upgraded to XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Server: Doesn't make sense unless you are sharing printers or files across a network like they do at big companies. In fact, it is a security risk if you are using your computer at home as a single user.
SSDP Discovery Service: It turns out that the things this "discovers" are pretty unlikely for you to have at your home and it may be a security risk to leave this on.
System Restore Service: Especially with this service, you need to read through the description on the "black viper" web page. This service creates a snap shot of my environment every so often. Besides the indexing, this is the largest offender of system resources on your service list. I made the decision to stop it because I don't think I will ever use it. Even if my drive crashes (knock on wood).
TCPIP Netbios: Provides legacy support for these networking formats. If you use a cable modem from home you probably don't need this service.
Terminal Services: If you are sharing your computer with several people you should leave this on. I am not so I shut it off.
WebClient: BlackViper has not found a reason to have this running and it is a security risk so I shut it down.
CachemanXP
I like the user interface in this product. It lists out all the processes and how much RAM they are using and allows you to individually recover the RAM from each process. Until I found Ram Saver Pro (I had to license a fee based product) this was my solution.
http://tinyurl.com/86v3o
BySoft FreeRAM
This is the only free product that I found that allows you to edit the cache size. I don't use it any longer. I used it for a while and tried to look up optimum configurations on the web but I was never able to optimize my memory use enough to make a noticeable difference. Also, every time you change the cache it requires you to shut down and it has to make some hard changes. I didn't like this "hard boot". It concerned me.
So I gave you all the negative stuff in the paragraph above. This is an application that you can use on your home PC for free and it does allow you to change the cache. So if you need to change the cache this is the product for you!
http://www.bysoft.com/download.php
Tiny Res Meter
This is the only desktop monitoring tool that I use now. It’s small and it provides all the information you need. Might Joe has searched the web and tried many different products but when it comes to monitoring your resources without sucking up all your resources this is the best product I’ve found.
http://pesoft.fr.st/
ConfigInspector
This is a Taskman like application but it's more of a system investigation and reporting tool. I was surprised by the amount of information available through this interface. There are plenty of ways to gather information like this but I really like having it at my fingertips and in an interface that I understand. ConfigInspector covers just about everything, CPU, network, memory, display... It doesn't take much ram to run and I think the information is valuable and should be kept available at all times. Try it out, you can't ask for a better system reporting tool.
http://softvoile.com/configinspector.php
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