Tips and Tweaks

Here’s some tips and tricks to increasing the performance of your Dell Mini 9. Most of these tricks are basic tweaks that you can do to any Windows XP system, and your mileage will vary based on your set up. As I discover more useful tweaks, I’ll post them here. (Last updated 26 Jan 08)

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Uncompressing The Storage Drive

Since the Dell Mini comes with such a small amount of disk storage space, Dell uses the “Disk Compression” option to maximize disk space. The bad thing with using disk compression, is the slow down you will experience when using your system. If you want the peformance increase and don’t mind giving up some extra disk space, you can easily uncompress the disk drive. Personally, I never use disk compression since I want to have a snappy, responsive system.

To turn off disk compression, right-click on the C: drive icon in File Explorer and select “Properties” from the popup context menu as shown below:

Now in the Properties dialog box, uncheck the box labeled “Compress Drive to Save Disk Space”. While you’re here, you can also uncheck “Allow Indexing Service” which will speed up system performance (Indexing is useful if you have a large, slow drive in your system. I turn this option off since we’re dealing with small solid state disk drives).

After you click the “OK” button, your system will begin decompressing the drive. This may take a few hours, so be patient.

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Disabling The Paging File

The paging file (Pagefile.sys) is a hidden file on your computer’s hard disk that Windows XP uses as if it were random access memory (RAM). The paging file and physical memory make up virtual memory. The default paging file size is equal to 1.5 times the total installed RAM. However, this default configuration may not be optimal in all cases.

So the Paging File is used by the system as low-speed RAM when the faster main memory RAM is exhausted. This method is quite useful if you have a system with a small amount of installed RAM, or if you run applications that use lots and lots of memory (like a CAD program).

Since most Netbook users won’t be running such memory-intensive applications or several different applications at the same time, you can probably reduce the Paging File size to a minimal amount (or even turn it off completely). This should speed up the system’s responsiveness and increase the amount of free storage space.

If you have 1 GB or less installed, you might try setting the Paging File to about 10% of your maximum installed RAM. So for 512 MB of RAM, you could use 50 MB for the Paging File size, and for 1 GB of RAM you could use 100 MB. If you’ve got 2 GB of RAM (or are daring), you can always turn off the Paging File entirely. This should give you maximum performance and free up extra storage space on your drive.

To make these setting changes, right-click on the “My Computer” icon on your desktop screen and select “Properties” from the popup context menu.On the “Advanced” tab, select “Settings” then click the “Change…” button on the next dialog box under the Virtual Memory setting as shown below:

The next dialog box that appears is where you can specify the Paging File size, or even turn it off entirely:

If you do run into problems running your system with these settings, you’ll most likely get an “out of memory” warning message. In which case, you simply need to increase your Paging File size or close out open applications.

In my case, I have 2 GB of RAM on my Dell Mini 9 so I’m planning to turn off the Paging File entirely and see if that works for my daily activities.

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Disable Precaching in Firefox

If you’re going to install and use Firefox as your web browser, it’s best to disable precaching. With this feature turned on, Firefox looks at links on the currently displayed page and begins to download the pages in a cache file in the background. This way, if you click on one of those links the browser appears to be fast since the page was already downloaded. On a system with limited disk space and limited memory, this can be a problem since Firefox will soon use up lots of memory with the precached pages.

To disable this option, start up Firefox on your system and type in “about:config” in the address bar and press Enter. Scroll down until you find the line that says, “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers“. Double-click on that line and change the value from -1 to 0 then click OK. Then, close down Firefox and restart it. The Precaching feature should now be turned off.

BTW, I love Firefox so I highly recommend you download and install it on your system.

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Remove the Preinstalled McAfee Software

In general, I’ve found that both McAfee and Norton AntiVirus programs to be very bloated and can slow down a PC system. As such, I recommend you remove the preinstalled McAfee software. In it’s place, I suggest you use the free home edition of Avast!, a wonderful antivirus application which you can download from www.avast.com. It’s a full featured package that runs very lean yet provides all the protection you need against viruses. I run Avast! on all my computer systems at home, so it was natural for me to also use it on my Dell Mini 9.

Get rid of McAfee and load a better and more efficient Antivirus program. Disable startup scan on Antivirus will speed things up faster during boot up.

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Install CCleaner For a Clean System

When you install and uninstall applications, your systems’ registry file can get filled with a lot of junk. As such, your system may start to slow down as it must wade through all the obsolete lines of setting values. To clean things up, I recommend you use the application called CCleaner for the Windows OS. With this application I suggest you stick with using the “Cleaner” and “Registry” features and don’t mess with the “Tools” or “Other” options. I often run CCleaner after I remove a lot of files or uninstall applications.

If you want to save on disk space, you can install the “portable” or “slim” versions of CCleaner available at this link.

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Disable Unnecessary Startup Programs

Installing many programs on your computer can often clutter your registry with unnecessary programs running when your computer starts up.  This will slow down your machine and take up memory. To disable these applications from launching on system start up, do the following:

1. Click on the start button and select run.
2. In the text box type msconfig and click ok.
3. Once the window has loaded, click on the startup tab and uncheck programs you do not want to start up.
4. Reboot your system.

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Turn Off Hibernation

Windows XP uses a file called hiperfil.sys to save everything it needs when Windows XP goes into hibernation. If you never use the hibernate function, you can turn it off.  By turning hibernate off, Windows XP deletes the hiberfil.sys file and thus can free up the as much disk space as the amount of ram that you have in your system. So if you have 2 GB of RAM on your Dell Mini, then turning off Hibernate will free up 2 GB of disk space.

Go to Control Panel/Power Options/Hibernation and untick the box. It’s as easy as that. Now you should have more disk space available on your system.

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Turn Off Last Access Time Stamps

Windows XP automatically updates the date and time stamp with information about the last time you accessed a file. Not only does it mark the file, but it also updates the directory the file is located in as well as any directories above it. If you have a large hard drive with many subdirectories on it, this updating can slow down your system.

To disable the updating, start the Registry Editor by selecting Run from the Start menu, typing regedit in the Open text box, and clicking OK. When the Registry Editor window opens, navigate through the left pane until you get to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem

In the right pane, look for the value named NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate. If the value exists, it’s probably set to 0. To change the value, double-click it. You’ll then see the Edit DWORD Value screen. Enter 1 in the Value Data field and click OK.

If the value doesn’t exist, you’ll need to add it. Select New | DWORD Value from the Edit menu. The new value will appear in the right pane, prompting you for a value name. Type NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and press [Enter]. Double-click the new value. You’ll then see the Edit DWORD Value screen. Enter 1 in the Value Data field and click OK. When you’re done, close Regedit. Your registry changes will be saved automatically. Reboot your system.

Note: Some backup programs may use the last access data for backing up files, so be aware that turning off this feature may affect your backups.

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Disable Short Filenames

Even though NTFS can support filenames with 256 characters in order to maintain backward compatibility with DOS and Windows 3.x systems, Windows XP stores filenames in the old 8.3 file format as well as its native format. For example, if a file is named “Speeding Up the Dell Mini.doc”,  Windows XP will save this file under that filename as well as SPEEDI~1.DOC.

To change this in the registry, start the Registry Editor. When the Registry Editor window opens, navigate through the left pane until you get to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem

In the right pane, look for the value named NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation. If the value exists, it’s probably set to 0. To change the value, double-click it. In the Edit DWORD Value screen, enter 1 in the Value Data field and click OK.

If the value doesn’t exist, you’ll need to add it. Select New | DWORD Value from the Edit menu. The new value will appear in the right pane, prompting you for a value name. Type NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation and press [Enter]. Double-click the new value. You’ll then see the Edit DWORD Value screen. Enter 1 in the Value Data field and click OK. When you’re done, close Regedit. Your registry changes will be saved automatically. Reboot your system.

Now, so long as you don’t have any really old applications that use the short filenames, you should be good (and have a faster running system).

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Stop Unnecessary Services

Windows XP runs many background services that can slow down your system. A lot of these services are not required, so you can disable them so they don’t start up at boot time. The easiest way to access these services is by doing the following:

1. Control Panel
2. Administrative Tools
3. Services

At this point, you should see several different services listed in the dialog box. You can then click on them to get a brief description (in most cases) and decide if you want to disable them, let the start up automatically, or if you want to manually run them. Just do a right-click and select “properties” for the items you’d like to change.

Now, you need to be careful when disabling services that you’re not sure about. If you go to a site like www.blackviper.com or www.jasonn.com they have a list of services with a description. You can also google those services that you’re not sure about.

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Cloning Your Disk Drive

After spending a couple of hours installing all you favorite applications and making your system tweaks, it would be a good idea to backup your entire system. The most complete way is to a “clone” or “image” of your disk drive. This cloned image file contains all the data on your disk drive, and can be “re-imaged” later if you want to restore everything back to when you made the original image. Or, you can re-image a new disk drive when you decide to upgrade and install a bigger drive module.

There’s lots of different applications available to do this, which I discuss in this posting. I highly recommend cloning your disk drive and saving the image file if you want to experiment with other OSes (e.g., Windows Vista, Windows 7, Ubuntu, etc) and later want to go back to your tweaked original installation.

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Making a custom “Slim” WinXP Installation

I have a posting that explains how to use the utility called nLite to create a custom set of Windows XP Installation Files that have been slimmed or reduced in size by removing unnecessary components and drivers. Using this technique, you can reduce the amount of space the WinXP operating system takes up on your Dell Mini from 5 GB to under 1 GB (depending on what components you remove).

Make sure you clone your disk first as a backup, before trying this “slimming” technique!