For
those of you who are constantly switching CD’s in your CD-ROM,
the auto-insert notification can be annoying as hell. This is that
Windows feature where it automatically looks for AUTORUN.INF on
the CD and runs it automatically. This is a feature that is great
for newbies who can’t find the setup program themselves, but
those who just need to grab one file off of a CD, this can be
annoying. There is a way to turn it off. Go to the Device Manager
and double click on the drive icon that represents your CD-ROM.
Hit the settings tab and clear the checkmark for auto insert
notification.
For
optimal performance, you should be sure that your CD-ROM settings
are set correctly. One of these is your CD-ROM cache. Go to the
Performance tab under System Properties. Now hit the File System
button under Advanced Settings and click the CD-ROM tab. Here you
can adjust the cache size. Small caches are good for multimedia
apps. Larger ones are good for database and CD-ROM access. For the best
performance, I’d leave it set at “Quad speed or higher”.
If
you have two hard drives on your system, pay attention to where
you put them. If you have an UltraDMA drive, be sure that this is
your primary drive. Do not put an older EIDE drive on the same bus
as the UltraDMA, as it will bog down the bus and slow down the
performance of the UltraDMA. Slower drives such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs,
and removable drives should be on their own bus too, separate from
the UltraDMA hard drive.
If
you are using windows 95, adjusting the Maximum Transmission Unit
(MTU) can really speed up your transmission speeds across the
internet. First, back up the registry. Then open up Regedit, use
the Find function to search for MaxMTU. When you get it,
right-click on it, select Modify, and change the value to 576.
Close the Registry and reboot.
For
an optimal swap file setup, we have come across this tip. First,
temporarily remove all shortcuts from your startup folder, go to
the Virtual Memory button under System Properties performance tab,
and disable virtual memory. Reboot, defrag your hard drive, and
then set your virtual memory minimum and maximum to the same
value, usually 2.5x your RAM amount, but 180 to 256 meg is usually
fine. You could also use Norton Utilities’s speed optimizer to
do this. It positions the swap file to the beginning of your drive
which is the fastest part.
Go
to the Performance tab under system properties and hit the File
System button. Make sure the typical role of the computer is set
to “network server”. This usually yields a slight performance
increase.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
