So summing up my tweak, for Logic and HalfLife 2 Episode 2, + no wireless etc, on XP, in Bootcamp (minimac).

1. Win32priorityseparation on 25(hex) in registry. – Which you should backup before doing this at all. (Which is short variable quantums, with 2x foreground boost, that on average most mimicked the low-latency linux-config that inspired this to begin with.)

2. Services left running:

3. Drivers left running. Devmanview report.

It is also nice to use “view by connection” in device manager, to see drivers related to signalflow.

I also turned off some unused USB drivers, and remote autoconnection drivers after this.

4. Through all of this I also visited quite a few unserious driver and tweak-sites. No tweak-apps seem neccesary, and the driverscan apps seem of low to mediocre quality. I did obtain the Matrox driver from “drivermax” though. Updating the drivers that are left, is ofcourse a good thing, but only a few are available from manufacturers site. Also got the 1394 driver from Vista. If anything should fail during driver-tweaking, F8 on boot + last known good configuration, usually works.

Of all the tweakinfo online, only a few tweaks seem relevant.
.. in Device Manager, Expand IDE ATA controllers Right click on Primary go to Properties then Advanced. Anywhere that you do not have a device (HD, CD, etc) set device type to none. Repeat for secondary channel.

.. Disabling System file protection. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] SFCDisable=1 (not needed on my machine, where logic audio, and steam is what is mostly running.)

..Turn off “prefecher” (After reboot I can`t say I really noticed much difference. It is supposed to speed it up.)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940847(v=winembedded.5).aspx

Prefetch dir is also: C:/windows/prefetch

..Turn off file indexing on drives.

..Turn off compatibility engine:  run>GPEdit.msc .. Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Application Compatibility \ Turn off Application Compatibility Engine.

..disabling Psched packet filter. There is no reason to filter all your packets.

The command “netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt” (run>cmd) seems to replace the “PSched” protocol in the UpperBind value of the Linkage Registry key for networking cards with Pschedless alternatives.

(psched entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\00etc\Linkage)

Now one can disable psched driver on network card also. (with for instance devmanview)

See also my post about open ports.

..Turning off DEP.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2008/06/17/to-dep-or-not-to-dep.aspx

I have a 2GB minimac. I edited my boot.ini and changed it to “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=alwaysoff /fastdetect /NOPAE”

..Turning off some difficult drivers.

(run>cmd)

sc config intelppm start= disabled
sc config redbook start= disabled (leave this on for CD support)
sc config dmio start= disabled
sc config rdbss start= disabled

One can also update some core windows files here.

5 Apptweaks: Logic buffer setting to “large”, and it also needs a vcache tweak for it`s outdated ram handling. Google it to see varying versions of it. (Edit: On my E5, also turning off “larger disk buffer” is better.) Half Life looks good with this. Since then I have also found the app “nvidia inspector”, which has some more settings, which I haven`t looked so closely at yet. Note for logic 2nd cpu trick, the lowest latencies (below 2ms) do not seem to work. For logic, one can also remove process affinity from cpu 1&2, if one has more than 2, for all other processes.

6. Ofcourse having a peek at msconfig, and removing unessecary startup-items is also good.

7. Reboot, for safety and some changes to take effect.

8. XPlite.

I also removed “telephony, system even notification, nt ml security, data access components., remote access dialup support” after this. Xplite also needs a reboot. Make sure that all services you don`t need are disabled, as services.msc will be unavailable on reboot. Xplite reports SFC as enabled, so one can turn it off there aswell.

9. Processes left running, and all at idle priority, to avoid cpu2 choking cpu1 at max (poor NT scheduler). With lesser important processess only on cpu2 (marked): (notepad open because I am noting down.) (If you get an error “system is shutting down, run>shutdown -a. I usually kill Smss, winlogon, lsass first (in that order)).
Lesser important processes also threads set to idle priority (doubleclick process in process hacker). The svchost carrying the audiosrv should be excepted from this. Threads in system and csrss can be set to “highest”. I also set dep off, in system-process, and killed thread for acpi.

10. Doing all this, will make it impossible to reboot from the OS. However you always have the power button. If you want reboot, you should not touch winlogon, lsass, and acpi. This tweak was also done for my minimac. If you do h/w exchanges, you need to keep the components related to that.

11. For cutting down even more, kill explorer.exe from process-hacker also, and use Process Hackers run, to launch apps.  Startmenu links are in  C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\ . To  get explorer back, just type explorer in Process Hackers run.12. Hack: Sillabilla, this is a script I am working on, that uses/abuses the fact that DPC latency is reduced, when a window is constantly moved. It can help low-latency audio-apps. (not good for games.) Open a notepad process, and run it, and it will resize it`s window. I hope to find a more graceful solution, so it can run all the time, without being intrusive. Which is on sourceforge, as usual. Note: I tried this on my bigger box also, which didn`t need this hack. and DPC latencies was reduced to 5uS, and 1ms latency audio worked fine. Games were still a bit smoother on my minimac. So getting a good hw/driver combo will give the best results: Update: I have now got an E5 workstation, which siginificantly reduces jitter, and many may consider skipping some of the steps in on this tweakpage, such as the xplite step, and others, on such hardware. After most, but not a few misc, on the E5 (also turning off Hyperthreading), DPC latency is around 5uS, but the numbers aren`t saying everything, as the computing experience is improved also.
The E5 drivers seem a bit more sensitive to tweaking, so I haven`t bothered doing much with them for now. Installing XP on the E5, also required SATA mode to IDE, and keyboard/mouse on usb2.0 ports backside. Turning off “optional roms” and reducing some bios wait times from 5 to 1, also makes it boot very fast.

(real performance is better )

Peace Be With You!