Performance Issues

[Kadri]

run MSConfig at run, select the Boot tab and "advanced options", tick the box that says "Number of Cores"

Good advice, but my advanced options are grayed out, so inaccessible... any idea why that would be?

Do you tried it with Administrator rights (if you have Vista or windows 7) ?

[Dune]

I have XP SP2 and administrator rights

[riche]

you may want to update to SP3, it'll plug some security hole and give better compatibility for hardware and security certificates, and may even resolve your grayed out advanced options, in XP MSCONFIG you need to select BOOT.INI and ADVANCED OPTIONS and the tick "/NUMPROC=" and then select the number of CPU's you want to use.

I'm trying the find a reg frag to do this but it's proving abit illusive, even with procmon, but as soon as I find it I'll post it up

I can definately recommend a few other tips as well for XP, bootvis.exe (MS) will drastically reduce your boot times, as it loads all your drivers side by side and not one at a time.

Auslogic defrag has the option to Optimize your files when defragging, i.e. it'll put the most used files on the fastest part of the disc plater, do this one before bootvis though.

black vipers reg tweaks are a must for XP, just to squeeze every bit of performance out of your rig. (I know BV again).

and if you can find get your hands on XP performance edition (you already have a license for XP so your not breaking the law here), it's tweaked for performance, and has really low over heads, giving more for rendering

[Kadri]

Good advices from Riche! And SP3 would be good for you if you have nothing problematic with this update.

Did you first checked the box that says 'Selective startup' Dune ? I am not sure maybe after this you have to reboot or so.
Just guessing !
I did a search , but couldn't find anything (directly) related to your problem.

[riche]

the reason why there's not that much documentation on this is that MS didn't really want people to do this, as with the first dual cores (that weren't really, they were just single cores that squeezed and extra instruction into each process, i.e hyperthreaded) it could cause problems.

But because there are now true dual and quad cores (AMD), (Some of the early intel quad's are duals that again are hyperthreaded) this is no longer a problem.

And it's really underground tweaks and techs that know about this setting as the layman doesn't really go poking round in the places I go, as I support and team of 3d render'ers in our web design department ... woa is me

[Henry Blewer]

I had SP3 XP on my Pentium 4 HT, worked fine. Windows 7 has been so much better. I recommend buying it. Vista was good to me, but I had to hand configure it so it was not so 'self interested'.

[Dune]

It's not really a big deal, guys, but I certainly appreciate the info. I have low overhead anyway because I have two versions of XP running on 2 partitions, one without web connection, so without zonealarm, virus scanners and all that necessary stuff. That's where my TG2 runs.
I'll go to windows 7 as soon as my pc is old enough to be 'dumped'.