speed up launching of programs (WXP)

[drazzio]

i recently found a way to speed up the time start menu displays by editing the regisrty. I was wondering if there is a similar way to speed up the way programs are launched when selected from say the start menu.
P.S. I have a 8.56 GB segate SCSI hard drive im expecting much better performance than im seeing here. I also have 2.45 GB left. can this be the problem? Thanx for your help guys in advance

[iTwins]

Try defragmenting your drives!

[Andy-S]

I agree. Here's why defragmenting your drive speeds up the launching of programs:

defragmenting a drive:

defrag and Taskmon - defragging a hard drive in Windows 98 can take hours (and I do mean hours) after a FAT 32 conversion but there is a good reason for that. Have you noticed that after a while (and a few defrags) that your applications load faster? No your not going crazy. This is supposed to happen and here's why.

In your Registry there is a utility being loaded called TaskMon (C:\Windows\Taskmon.exe). TaskMon monitors your hard drives disk access patterns during program loads and logs the information to a hidden Windows directory called APPLOG. When you go to defrag your hard drive, Disk defragmentor uses the information found in this directory to optimize your system by placing all the files that a specific program needs to load in the same area on the hard disk. This reduces the number of lengths the disk needs to seek, which account for a large chuck of load times for any application.

TaskMon collects data as you use applications and adapts to optimize the applications you run most frequently. Example: If you run Netscape more often than I.E. 4.0, defrag will concentrate on optimizing Netscape program loading vs. I.E. Program loading. After you finish defragging the application (s) should open faster.

This section provided by **** Miller - defrag will seem much slower than in Win95, relocating EVERY sector at the start of each defrag session. That's NOT a problem. It is packing the new and changed files at the front of the disk rather than at the back, so the beginning of defrag is more busy than in Win95. But the tail end of the defrag will be correspondingly faster and the total time is not increased. Why the change? With the most-recently-accessed files (which usually are also the most-accessed ones) "up front," disk accesses will run faster.

In order for TaskMon to perform at its best you need to run Windows 98 for a good week or so allowing TaskMon to build and update the APPLOG file (s) and collect all the necessary information that it needs. This log is updated as you use your programs so performing a defrag right after you load Windows 98 will NOT show a significant increase in your most commonly used applications.


Cheers
Andy