Good, Bad & Ugly Tweaks

Everyone wants a faster computer. Some people just go out and buy a faster one. If you’re a tweak freak, you probably think that’s cheating. After all, isn’t there always some change or tweak that can make your current system faster? Well, that’s half right; there is always some tweak you can make, considering that there are dozens of tweak sites on the Internet suggesting hundreds of different changes to Windows settings. A lot of them involve the Registry, which can be a dangerous place to play if you don’t know what you’re doing. Plus, a lot of those tweaks don’t help or actually make things worse. So let’s cover some of the good, bad, and ugly tweaks out there.

The Good

Many Registry-oriented tweaks are out there are just the “hard way” to do something that already has its own user interface. Whenever possible, use the interface that Windows gave you to make the change. Although you may be able to find a setting in the Registry that seems to do the trick, there are sometimes multiple interrelated values. If you change just one value in one location, the tweak may appear to work correctly at first but will have some hidden trouble down the road.

Windows XP’s Visual Effects dialog is a good example of the simple way to do something that changes a lot of Registry settings. Right click the My Computer icon and select Properties and then click the Advanced tab. In the Performance section of the dialog, click the Settings button. Normally, this will be set to Let Windows Choose What’s Best For My Computer, but who’s to say Windows knows what’s best? If you want to make your PC
fly, select Adjust For Best Performance instead. That will eliminate a lot of the cartoonish aspects of the WinXP interface, though, and you may want to keep a few. If so, choose Custom instead and check as few of the boxes as you can—every one of those effects saps some performance. In particular, older systems get a lot faster if you turn off animations and drop shadows under menus. There’s one useful user interface setting that is not covered by that dialog. Normally, WinXP waits about half a second before showing the Programs menu when you mouse over it on the Start menu. Once you’re familiar with the Windows interface, half a second seems like a long time. To get a faster menu, use Regedit to create a new string entry named “MenuShow-Delay” in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\CONTROL PANEL\DESKTOP. The value should be the number of milliseconds to wait before the menu displays; I suggest a number around 200. Do not set the value to zero, although you can set it to 1 if you’d like.

The Bad

You can get yourself into a lot of Class A trouble by carelessly deleting files or Registry keys in an attempt to speed up a system, but that’s not the kind of tweaking we’ll focus on here. Truly bad tweaks have technical details that make them seem plausible even when they’re not. Sometimes they are simply placebos and have no real effect on your system. Other times, the Registry setting does something—just not what it’s claimed to do. In a few cases, the tweak even does the opposite of what is claimed. Somehow these bad tweaks take on a life of their own, spreading like bird flu across dozens of “Windows tips” sites all over the Internet.

Although there are many critical values in the Windows Registry, you can create additional values almost anywhere in the Registry. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, those extra keys and values don’t make a difference if no software is around to read them. In some cases, the tweaks used to work in older versions of Windows but no longer apply in WinXP. The IOPageLockLimit Registry value, for example, used to carry out a specific function in Windows 2000 but does nothing in Win-XP. Then there are tweaks such as EnableSuperFetch that may have been created as a prank; WinXP does not ever use a Registry value by that name. (The Windows Vista, on the other hand, just might.) Perhaps the most infamous tweak was the one that spawned the “Microsoft steals 20% of your bandwidth” rumor. Some misguided tweaker misunderstood the meaning of some Registry settings and from that error decided that by just tweaking a Registry key it was possible to “get that bandwidth back” and improve performance. This nontweak was so widespread that Microsoft even wrote a support article to set the record straight (support .microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=316666).

The Ugly

Some bad tweaks are so bad that they transfer from the Bad Train and take the express line straight to Uglyville. These are the terrible tweaks that can cause system instability or unexplained failures. Most of the time, you’ll spend weeks trying to figure out what’s wrong but usually can’t connect the tweak with the failure. Or perhaps the tweak will reach out and clobber you when you least expect it.

A few months back I called out the DisablePagingExecutive tweak that forces Windows to keep certain system code always in memory. That tweak can cause an ugly crash if you
use it with a system that has very little memory (say, less than 384MB) or if you sleep
and hibernate the computer as you typically might with a portable computer. Disabling the page file “to improve performance” is one of those nightmare tweaks that won’t go away. If you have lots of memory, the page file gets very little action since Windows prefers to keep everything in memory. But should you ever have a program that needs memory and Windows does not have a page file, it has no choice but to crash. Given a choice between going slow and crashing, I’ll take slow any day.

When a system crashes abruptly, files or Registry settings can become corrupted. It’s a good thing you have System Restore to help you get back to an uncorrupted set of data. That is, unless you’ve disabled System Restore. That’s another tweak-goneamok that some Web sites advocate. The justification is that it can slow down the process to checkpoint system settings, and it can take a lot of disk space. That may have been true when System Restore first appeared in Windows Me, but the WinXP version is pretty unobtrusive. If you want to adjust the disk space it uses, it’s easy to change. Just right-click My Computer and then click Properties and the System Restore tab. But don’t turn it off.

One of the recurring themes in bad tweaks is that they seem a bit too good to be true. If there’s really a tweak that would increase performance by 50%, why wouldn’t it be enabled by default? Even when there’s a small performance benefit, keep an eye out for the downside of the change. Sometimes the best thing to do is leave things alone. Or, as mom used to say, “Don’t pick at it—you’ll make it bleed!”
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by Dave Methvin