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Since the dawn of Windows, power-user tipsters (us included) have proff ered hundreds of sug-
gestions with the promise of improving your PC’s performance or streamlining its operation.
The tip-givers have the best of intentions, but do all of those tweaks, registry hacks, utilities,
and “undocumented secrets” really make any diff erence? To our surprise, in a number of cases,
it turns out that tips that sound great on the surface don’t actually do anything when you put
the screws to them. And some of those complicated registry hacks are more easily done with
tools like TweakUI, saving you a lot of hassle.
We put 25 of the most commonly published XP and Vista performance tips and registry
hacks to the test. Do the speed tweaks yield dividends? We clocked performance with PCMark
and timed boots and shutdowns repeatedly aft er making the changes suggested in the tips. In
the end, we found that many tips were right on the money, but some were outright wrong or
just a waste of time. Some tips fell into the gray area in between, off ering some improvement
but perhaps not enough to merit the trouble of the hack to begin with. On the following pages,
we indicate the strength of each tip with a validity meter.
Read on for our results. You’ll never tweak the same way again!Windows
Tips: Do the most
popular ones
really do anything?
BY CHRISTOPHER NULL