PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 37 Pin the Kernel in RAM

Force Windows NT operating systems to keep themselves in RAM for faster performance.

An excellent performance hack for Windows 2000, XP, and 2003 is a feature that lets you specify whether or not to allow Windows to swap the main portion of itself, the operating system kernel, and swappable drivers out to the swap/pagefile or not.

This hack is intended for systems with large amounts of RAM (512 MB or more) and involves editing the Windows registry or using a system tweaking program. If your system has 256 MB of RAM or less, consult [Hack #30] before taking advantage of this hack.

To use the registry editing method follow these steps:

Setting the value of this entry to 1 forces the kernel and drivers to remain in physical memory. If it is set to 0, these items can be swapped from memory to disk as needed, obviously affecting performance because data transfers are slower to and from disk than memory.

If editing the registry is not your style, you can use a tweaking program called X-Setup or X-Setup Pro from X-Teq Systems (http://www.xteq.com) for setting this and many other gimmicks in Windows, as shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. X-Setup provides access to many tweaks for Windows

To use X-Setup to configure this hack, follow these steps:

From this point forward, the operating system's kernel and swappable drivers will stay in RAM, and you should notice less swapping activity and slightly better performance over long-term use of the system.

You probably will not see a performance improvement from this hack in a benchmarking program without also running other programs in the background to load up your RAM and keep the CPU busy.

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