Dwight Silverman takes a closer look at some XP tweaks that made it to the front page of Digg and says, Don’t Digg that XP tweak. His conclusion bears repeating:
It’s not a great idea to apply random tweaks you spot on the Web to your system, even if you spot them on a high-profile tech site such as Digg. Get a second opinion by doing some searching, and do some research at sites such as XP Myths.
Dwight’s absolutely right. Many so-called Windows tweak sites are filled with misinformation. (See the prefetch myth for a prominent example.) I’m certain the people who pass this stuff along are well-meaning, but they don’t understand the internals of memory management, and so they’re easily misled. They’re convinced that there’s some secret group of Registry settings that can magically improve performance (one Microsoft engineer called this the “make rocket go now” urban legend).
In particular, Dwight wonders whether it’s OK to enable a Registry change to the DisablePagingExecutive setting. Here’s my take:
For the average person, making a chance to the DisablePagingExecutive setting is like trying to perform a lobotomy on yourself with a pair of knitting needles.
What this setting does is to prevent drivers and kernel code from being written to the pagefile. Now, think this through logically. If you’re running so many programs that you exceed the amount of physical memory in your system and you start up a new program or process, the operating system has to move some program code and data out of memory and into the pagefile to make room for the bits you just requested. You could let the OS make intelligent choices about which bits to swap. Or you could constrain it by saying, “Don’t ever swap this type of code out.” If you enable this tweak, you limit the flexibility of the OS and force it to throw something else out, which in this case is one of the other programs you’re running. That increases the delay you’ll encounter when you switch back to the other app.
This setting is provided for use in servers, where administrators run a limited and well-known set of applications and need to debug or tune for performance in a controlled environment. Using it in a workstation is asking for trouble.
In general, I recommend against trying to change the way Windows memory management works. It’s a system. Tweaking one aspect of it runs the risk of destabilizing the entire system. It’s also worth noting that this setting has been around since the Window NT era. Now, Microsoft’s engineers are obsessive about performance. They know that reviewers will put a stopwatch to every new release, and so they tune and tune and tune to get the memory paging system working effectively. If this setting really made a difference in performance, don’t you think it would be enabled already?
If you’re really concerned about performance, the smartest thing you can do is monitor memory usage in your environment. If you’re consistently exceeding the amount of physical RAM in your system, either do less (shut some programs down before running memory-intensive applications) or install more memory.
Ed Bott 
This blog entry mentions (and links to) my all-time favorite performance tweak: using Task Manager to monitor memory management. It doesn’t cost you a dime, and it works better than anything you can buy. Every Windows XP and Vista book should contain a chapter dedicated solely to how memory management actually works and why you should care.
Ed, thanks again for posting that entire series on Task manager last year. It is truly the only “performance utility” software any XP user actually needs. And it doesn’t even tweak a single XP setting.
Ken
You guys obviously have not done any type registry hacking. If you actually knew windowsxp inside out you would know how much the task manager truly is pathetic. Talk with the sysinternals guys about a good so call task manager. This is a pathetic blog. Thanks for the waste of web space.
Immature responses like that are what you get when you prove people wrong about their mythical “tweaks”. Lame!!! grow up.
It is funny that Lamer mentioned the sysinternals guy. I’ve actually read their book. It explained in superb detail how XP actually works to optimize performance. And it is pretty much exactly what Ed said in the last paragraph of his blog entry about memory management. He’s right only in that they do have an alternative program to Task Manager called Process Explorer. But it is merely Task Manager with a few extra bells and whistles.
Hmm….this isn’t clear. The “he” in the next to last sentence refers to Lame!!!, not Ed. Sorry about that.
Well sorry to say, but i have used some of what you so call myth tweaks and guess what the performance on my pc improved a great deal.
Eduard,
Any performance improvement you perceived had nothing to do with the mentioned Mythical Tweaks. If you think they actually did something please provide documented reproduceable evidence using a clean install of XP with the only variable being the one “tweak” you alledge works. You will never find this evidence with any of these so called “tweaks” because the reality is they either do nothing or worse REDUCE PERFORMANCE.