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Windows 2000: Configuring and Optimizing Windows 2000

Well, you successfully (I hope) installed Windows 2000. What now? Now, after downloading, we first need to create in the system another user besides the Administrator. This is done very simply: "Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administration - Computer Management". There we select "Local groups and users" and finally select the "Users" submenu. Then - "Action" - "New user". Here there is a small nuance - on the recommendations of Microsoft and the best dog breeders, is not advised to work under the Administrator's rights. This is due to the fact that in the case of work under the rights of the "Administrator" in the system there is a security hole and other holes. Therefore, it would be logical to create a new user account with the rights "Experienced user". But the fact is that if you boot up under the "Power User" privileges, you will not be able to install drivers or most new programs into the system. In order to get rid of these problems, I would advise you at this time to assign this account the rights "Administrator", and after you have configured the entire system and install all the required programs - change the rights to "Experienced user". And one more thing: as I did not try, I did not find a way to burn CDs with the rights that are different from "Administrator", for example, using the NERO program. Eventually, by logging in to the system under the "Power user" privileges, you can run the installation program on behalf of "Administrator" in the following way: select the installation file, press and hold "Shift" and right-click. Select "Run as ..." from the drop-down menu. That's all. Well, God be with him, it's not about that now ...

What is usually the first thing that catches your eye? Yeah, kind of desktop. Perhaps he will suit you as he is. Even better, if Windows has independently determined the type of video adapter and installed the necessary drivers for it. Worse, if there were no drivers, but you did download them from the manufacturer's website in advance, is not it? And let's hope that this is not a beta version, but a normal one. Why is it good, if Windows itself has identified and installed drivers for your hardware? This is good for several reasons: first, it means that the type of devices installed in your system unit is officially recognized as suitable for working with Windows 2000. And secondly, it's better to do without experiments at first and use those drivers , Which for Windows 2000 are native. It is unlikely that in this case you will have problems caused by improper drivers. Further, after you are convinced that the drivers for the video card Windows installed (if not installed - install those that you downloaded), it's time to look into the depths of the system. "My Computer - Properties - Hardware - Device Manager". Make sure that all your hardware has been properly recognized and that the drivers and necessary settings have been installed. I especially draw your attention to the option "DMA (Direct Memory Access)", which is available for the primary and secondary controllers, in the "IDE ATA / ATAPI Controllers" section. This will greatly accelerate the work with the hard drive. And by the way, most simple manipulations and adjustments to increase the performance of your desktop system are due to the optimization of work with the hard disk ...

By the way, if the heart of your system is a processor from AMD, then create in the registry a parameter with the value "ffffffff" (in hexadecimal) and the following characteristics:

  REGEDIT4
 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \
 Memory Management]
 "LargePageMinimum" = dword: ffffffff 

This will fix the incorrect work with AGP.

And now, I want to warn you in advance: if you first installed Windows 2000 on your machine, do not install or upgrade the drivers in bulk. It's better to spend some time on rebooting than to scratch the top of the head and try to figure out what the hell this "blue screen of death" popped up. If the drivers you want to slip into the system tested in battle - there is nothing to fear. Although I would not take any chances. Ideally, after each installed driver or any changes in the system it is desirable to reboot. In this case, you, at least, will be exactly sure what caused the vagaries of Windows, who does not want to be loaded. By the way, there are rumors that Windows NT (and Windows 2000 in particular) has a magic gift: if the system hangs and displays the "blue screen of death" at boot time, then if 6-10 reboots, it will restore everything and work as a pretty . Nothing like this! Windows 2000, like any OS, does not have super abilities. If the error is not critical, it may load (remember, in the same situation with the 5th time, Win98 reluctantly, but still loaded?), And if the problems are serious, then there will be no sense from blunt pushing "RESET". It is better to try to write down the type of the error that is produced and determine what the problem is in fact ...

Well, let's return to our sheep. After you have installed all the drivers for the queue for currently available Service Packs. After installing them, you will need to restart the computer. Now let's take a look here: "Start - Settings - Control Panel - Administration - Event Viewer". I highly recommend that you make a shortcut to the desktop for this item - this logbook will be a very good help in diagnosing problems in Windows 2000. Look in the "Application log" section. If there are no mistakes, rejoice - everything goes according to plan. If you find any error, it is desirable to find a way to eliminate it. Some errors are not critical and you can work without problems, but do not forget: this is a mistake. In the "parsing flights" and searching for options for eliminating errors, the following link will help you: http://support.microsoft.com .

And now we move on to optimizing the work with the hard disk. If you do not have other operating systems on your computer besides Windows 2000, convert all the FAT and FAT32 partitions of the hard disk into NTFS. This will increase the speed of disk operations by about 5-10%. In addition, NTFS is more stable and better protected from errors when working with a disk. And the size of clusters in this file system is much less, which will help you to free up such precious 100-200 megabytes, or even more. But remember that these partitions will not be accessible from other operating systems, and if you can not start Windows 2000, the only way to access data on a partition with NTFS is to boot using the Windows 2000 installation floppies. And, especially if you Two systems, one of which is Windows 9X / Me, in no case do not convert partition C: to NTFS - you can not start the system data. Methods of converting were considered earlier.

If you switched to the NTFS file system - at least once a month, and the more often - the better, do the defragmentation. The matter is that NTFS because of design features is extremely subject to fragmentation and there can come such day when you generally can not load the computer just because of a strong fragmentation. You can defragment both with the built-in defragmenter and third-party programs. Of all the options available to me most of all I liked the work of Norton Speed ​​Disk. If someone does not like the products of this software giant, I can recommend PerfectDisk 2000, a 30-day trial version can be downloaded at http://www.raxco.com . So, if you notice that your system has become too slow - it's time to defragment. And it's best to check all the disks for errors. And again: if you use the built-in defragmenter, run it several times: it does not immediately defragment the disk.

Next, we have a swap file on the list. It's better to put it on the second hard disk, if there is one. If there is no such option, the best option is to place it in a separate section on the hard disk. And the closer - the better. Personally, I have for this purpose the section D :. It is desirable that it was empty, but it is best to format it beforehand. Why do I need an empty partition? In order that after transferring the paging file (pagefile.sys) to it, it immediately eats off a single piece of disk space, which excludes its fragmentation. After that, we do the following: "My computer - Properties - Advanced - Performance parameters - Edit". Then select the desired partition and enter the size of the paging file. It's better not to be greedy and enter a size larger than recommended, so that when using "heavy" applications do not run into a lack of memory. Also, the initial and final size should be set equal. Then click on "ask". To get rid of other disks from the swap file, put "0" in the size and also click "set". After the system is rebooted, the paging file will be migrated.

Temporary files. The same: it is better to get rid of them on the system disk and move to the partition with the swap file. First, in the root directory of this section, create the "TEMP" folder. Then follow the following path: "My computer - Properties - Advanced - Environment variables". We press "to change" and in values ​​we specify "D: \ TEMP". That for the first, that for the second variable. Verify that the values ​​in the System Variables window are the same, and change them as necessary.

Temporary Internet Explorer files. And they are also up to the heap in our section, along with cookies and temporary files. The path is the following: on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop, or in the "service - browser properties" menu, click on "options" and select "move". Enough to specify the disk, and the folder "Temporary Internet Files" IE will create itself. After the "soft" reboot, the files will be moved, but the old folder with all the files will not go anywhere, it needs to be removed using pens.

If you have a printer or you are working with Microsoft Fax, you should change the location of the spool file. Open the "Printers" folder, then "file - server properties - other - queue folder". Change the path to either the D: drive or the D: \ printers folder that you want to create beforehand.

Another feature of the NTFS file system. One of the reasons for its slowness is that every time you view a folder (for example, in a document save window), Windows 2000 updates the last access time stamp for all files in this directory. And, if there are several hundred or thousands of files in the folder, it will take quite a considerable amount of time.

In general, this method is only positioned for Intel chipsets. Nevertheless, according to my personal feelings, on the basis of other chipsets this feature also gives a performance gain. Now one more thing. Reboot to the Recovery Console and enter the following line: ENABLE ULTRA66 SERVICE_SYSTEM_START.

After you have done all these steps, reboot the computer and after defragmenting, defragment all the partitions. By the way, remember that all of the above operations are quite critical and, in case of erroneous input of parameters, can lead to system crash. And I do not want to bear responsibility for someone's negligence.

Now let's deal with the Explorer. Have you ever happened that after the Internet Explorer or the Explorer hung, they dragged the entire system behind them, and you, terribly swearing, restarted the computer? The problem is that Explorer (Explorer) acts as both a Windows shell and a quality file manager. And although this increases the convenience, the use of memory is not the best way. Under normal conditions, the Explorer takes 8 MB of Win2000 memory because of memory allocation problems: Windows uses a double memory quota for Explorer, considering it to be used by different programs. To get rid of this problem, "integrated" into the system, you need to run Explorer as two separate processes instead of one.

If you work with Outlook Express, I recommend downloading Internet Explorer version 6. It has already been verified that it works much faster with large email databases, and IE6 runs faster. At the time of this writing, the only place where you could download the Russian version of IE 6 - Microsoft.com .

Another fad. Check here: "My Computer - Properties - Advanced - Download and Restore". Here you can set which system should be loaded by default, after what period of time to load the selected system automatically. Also, I advise you to uncheck the "perform automatic reboot" option, otherwise it can happen so that suddenly the machine will constantly reboot, and what's the problem will be very difficult to understand without the Stop screen. Also, I advise you not to write debugging information: it's unlikely that you'll ever get to pick it, and it will take up space on the disk. And not a small place.

To configure the "hidden features" of Windows 2000, I recommend downloading a small program from Microsoft - TweakUI . With its help, you can adjust a bunch of trivia: from the speed of the menu response, to the hiding of some discs. The program is in English, so you might need a dictionary.

Another great feature in Windows 2000 is Hibernate mode or, as it was translated into Russian, "Sleep mode". The essence of this innovation is that it performs the same function as the "Standby Mode", but does it a hundred times better. The beauty is that when you enter this mode, the system resets the memory dump to the hard drive and turns off the power. And during the exit from it loads all the information from the hard disk into the main memory. Now you do not need to start your work day from opening the required programs, downloading the necessary files, etc. etc. And the main difference from the "waiting" mode - after a power failure or disconnecting the computer from the network with your data, or what will not happen, because they are physically located on the hard drive. Fly in the ointment: on the hard drive in the partition where the system is installed, you need a free space equal to the number of megabytes of your RAM. But the full load of the system from the "sleeping" mode takes less than a minute. To activate this mode, do the following: "Start - Settings - Control Panel - Power - Sleep". There put a tick "After the suspension go to sleep mode." And on the "additional" tab, you can assign the default function of the switch to hibernate mode by turning off the computer on the ATX case. However, I must warn: it will not work for all machines at the power button.

And once again I want to remind you: do not forget to conduct prophylaxis once a week, check the disk for errors and defragment the file system. I do not know what caused such a dullness in the work of Scandiska, but, nevertheless, do not neglect this procedure. If suddenly you have stopped working correctly programs or the system behaves strangely, - obviously errors on the disk. Especially I do not understand what in Windows 2000 to explain the problem with automatic detection of errors on the disk. It's better to do it through the handbrake.