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.

Last week I explained how to schedule the Disk Cleanup utility to perform basic maintenance tasks. But the Disk Cleanup utility can be overkill, and in some cases you might not want it to run through all its options. How can you tell it you just want it to just clean out the Windows Temp folder? The answer is found in some amazingly useful command-line switches that most Windows users know nothing about. (They’re documented in Windows XP Inside Out and in Knowledge Base article 315246, How to Automate the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP.)

To control how the cleanup process works, you need to first know the executable command for the Disk Cleanup utility, cleanmgr.exe. Then you need to learn to use the following switches to modify its behavior:

• /D driveletter  Runs Disk Cleanup using the drive letter you specify in place of driveletter (for example, type cleanmgr /d c:, to apply the utility to drive C). (This option is ignored if you use the /Sagerun switch.)
• /Sageset:n  Opens a dialog box that lets you select Disk Cleanup options, creates a registry key that corresponds to the number you entered (where n is an arbitrary number from 0 through 65535), and then saves your settings in that key.
• /Sagerun:n  Retrieves the saved settings for the number you enter in place of n and then runs Disk Cleanup without requiring any interaction on your part.

To put all the pieces together, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, Run (or open a Command Prompt window) and type the command cleanmgr /sageset:200. (This number is completely arbitrary; you can choose any number from 0 through 65535.)
2. In the Disk Cleanup Settings dialog box, choose the options you want to apply whenever you use these settings. In this example, I’ve cleared all the check boxes except the one in front of Temporary files.

   

3. Click OK to save your changes in the registry.
4. Create a shortcut that uses the command cleanmgr /sagerun:200. Save the shortcut in the Windows folder using a descriptive name – Clean Temp Files, for instance.
5. Open Control Panel’s Scheduled Tasks folder and start the Add Scheduled Task Wizard. When prompted to select the program you want Windows to run, click Browse and select the shortcut you just created. Follow the wizard’s remaining prompts to schedule the command to run at regular intervals.
6. Repeat steps 1–5 for other Disk Cleanup options you want to automate.

That’s it. As long as the Task Scheduler service is running, your cleanup chores will be handled automatically on the schedule you specified.

Last week, I showed how to clean out your Windows Temp folder properly.

Today’s tip is a follow-up to that item, showing how you can schedule some routine maintenance chores to be performed automatically.

The secret is buried in the Scheduled Tasks folder, which you can find in Control Panel. (It’s in the Performance and Maintenance group, if you use the Category view of Control Panel.)

Open the Scheduled Tasks folder and double-click Add Scheduled Task. This launches the Scheduled Task Wizard, which walks you through the process of creating a new task. After you get past the opening screen, you’ll see a list of available programs on your PC. Select the Disk Cleanup entry and click Next.

Enter a name for the task (the default should work just fine in this case) and specify how often you want the task to run – daily, weekly, etc. The next secreen in the wizard varies, depending on the option you choose. This screen, for instance, shows a task that has been scheduled to run once a week – at 2:30 AM every Monday.

In the next screen, enter the user name and password of the account whose credentials you want the task to use. This data (which is saved in encrypted format) allows a scheduled task to run even if you’re not logged on. It also allows a task that requires administrative privileges to run when a user with a limited account is logged on.

Finish the wizard to save the scheduled task.

Follow-up: I’ve put together instructions to help you customize the Disk Cleanup task so it performs only the options you want it to run.

In the comments to a post entitled Everything you always wanted to know about Windows Product Activation, Tim asks:

How do you tell if a product has an OEM vs Retail install? … I have some integrated computers I am responsible for and when I call tech support, they sometimes ask which version of XP/2000 I am running, OEM or Retail.  I got thrown into this and the last guy didn’t keep up with things very well…any help is appreciated!

It’s easy to tell once you know where to look. Right-click the My Computer icon and choose Properties. (You can reach the same destination by starting in Control Panel and double-clicking System.) On the General tab of the System Properties dialog box, under the “Registered to” heading, you’ll see a product ID, which is divided into four groups of characters separated by hyphens. On an OEM installation, the second group of characters is always OEM; on a retail installation, you’ll see three numbers in this group.

That might be your only OEM fingerprint on a computer built in-house or by a “white box” system maker. But for systems from larger PC makers, including the so-called royalty OEMs, you should also see a product logo and the words “Manufactured and supported by” followed by the name of the company that built the PC. Here’s an example:

One other piece of advice: If you’ve inherited a group of computers and don’t have a handy index to identify the product ID required to reactivate each one, use the wonderful Keyfinder utility to dig out Windows and Office keys, which you can copy to a database or print out and save for future reference. I first wrote about Keyfinder back in December 2002, and it’s still one of my most popular pages.

Excel whiz John Walkenbach inspired today’s tip with this post:

I haven’t looked at my Windows \temp directory in a long time. I used to be pretty good about keeping it cleaned out, but I’ve ignored it lately. I just looked at it and found that it contains

• 4,272 files
• 95 folders
• 721Mb

Yikes! Shouldn’t this stuff should be deleted by the apps that placed them there?

Well, yes and no. I just checked this system and discovered 95MB of disk space in use by 496 files and 103 folders, most of them empty. The entire collection dates back about 60 days, which must be the last time I cleaned out temp files.

Some of those files were ones I created or downloaded. (Putting them in the Temp folder is the best way of dealing with files you are positive you won’t want to keep.) When I play a media file directly from a browser or view a Word document or PDF page in the browser window, the downloaded WMV or DOC or PDF file is saved in my Temp folder. Microsoft Office creates a bunch of temp files as it works to keep track of changes and enable its automatic recovery features. I don’t bother deleting these files manually after I’m done, and I don’t expect any program to aggressively clean them up either. The whole idea of the Temp folder is to serve as a junk drawer for files, and any program that puts a file there should assume it’ll get tossed out with the trash sooner rather than later when I empty the Temp folder.

Here are three ways to do just that:

• The hard way: delete files manually using Windows Explorer. As J-Walk discovered, Explorer quits abruptly as soon as you encounter a file that’s in use – and at least on my computer the Temp folder is usually filled with a dozen or more files in use. To avoid hitting one of those files, display the folder’s contents in Details view and then sort by date. That way you can delete files in groups. Select the oldest files and delete them, then select a newer group of files and delete those, until you get to a group that includes some files in use. At that point you can stop. You’ve probably cleaned out all that you can do.
• The easier way: Use the Disk Cleanup Wizard. Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup. Pick a drive, click OK, and wait for the quick analysis. Click OK again, and you’ll empty the Recycle Bin, clear out Internet Explorer’s cache, and empty all files from the Temp folder that are more than a week old.



• The really easy way: Create a Scheduled Task to have your system clean out your Temp folder and perform other cleanup chores automatically. If you poke around in the Scheduled Tasks folder, you’ll see that this option is available with a wizard’s help.

To learn how you can schedule this bit of routine maintenance to run once a week (or on any schedule you prefer), see this tip.