Improve System Performance

There are several small things that you should do to tune up your PC performance.

The one that I presenting for improving your system performance painlessly is through disabling Windows Performance Counters.

Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have a built-in performance monitor that essentially monitor performance on your machine.

Performance counters are the tools used by Windows to monitor and track the errors and bottlenecks in the speed and performance of Windows. But they are TOO technical in nature and are difficult to be used by a common Windows user. They can, generally be used by an IT administrator or a developer to tweak the performance related to CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, Processes Exchange and many other things. They keep on gathering their data from Windows in the background but in the process eat up precious system resources.

You can safely consider disabling Performance Counters without loosing anything. This will surely help to speedup your Windows and make it run faster.

To disable follow the steps below.

1. Download and install Extensible Performance Counter List (615kb) from Microsoft’s website [http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/exctrlst/1.00.0.1/nt5/en-us/exctrlst_setup.exe]

2. Run the program which resides in "C:\Program Files\Resource Kit\exctrlst.exe"

3. Clear the "Performance Counters Enabled" check box for each counter listed.

Note: Do realize that a lot of the information collected by the performance counters can be very helpful in analyzing problems on your computer. If your PC shows errors or maybe sometimes you face problem while installing any program that requires perticular performance counter enabled then in such situation make sure to enable all counters then install that program and then you can disable all the counters again.

Once I encountered likewise problem while installing Microsoft Visual Studio, then I have to enable "PerfOS" performance counter (shown in image below) to proceed with the installation.