Re: Is Windows XP a bit of a dog (speed-wise)?

Thanks very much. That DID help. I've been struggling to get decent font rendering on my 17" LCD monitor - with ClearType and other futzing around - and I think at one point I may have optimized for "appearance" rather than performance. I need ClearType turned on, or things are REALLY ugly. (It was turned off when I optimized solely for performance as you suggested, but first optimizing for performance and then turning on ClearType only seems to speed everything up.)

Thanks again for your help.

Tom


Shenan Stanley wrote:

Tom Kreutz wrote:

I'm running a Dell Optiplex GX240, 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, 512K cache,
with 1 GB of RAM.  I've been happily using Windows 2000 for three
years, but recently my machine was hacked, and the IT folks just
installed Windows XP.
I find that every part of the GUI appears to have slowed down
considerably.  Menus and windows visibly take time to open (it is
still relatively fast, but not instantaneous as before).

Is this typical of XP? 


Typical?  Perhaps at default settings - not optimized.

You can turn off almost all of Windows XPs "prettifications" and fancy sliding/fading tricks - speeding up everything. Using nothing more than Microsoft's TweakUI PowerToy and the built in performance - your machine should run faster (seemingly) than Windows 2000 did.

Control Panel --> System --> Advanced tab --> Performance section,
Settings button.  Then choose "adjust for best performance" and you
now have a Windows 2000/98 look which turned off many of the annoying
"prettifications" in one swift action. You can play with the last
three checkboxes to get more of an XP look without many of the
other annoyances.  You could also grab and install/mess with one
(or more) of the Microsoft Powertoys - TweakUI in particular:

 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

In TweakUI, be sure to look for "Menu Show Delay" tweak.. But that is not the only one.

Remember - Windows XP is Windows 2000 - next revision. It was made to look like it does to be more user friendly to those used to Windows 9x/ME - as there was going to be no alternative/continuance of the 9x line.

.