I’ve tried the tweaks found on this page and I’m satisfied with them: the system is more responsive, and ReNoise had a little boost too.
These tweaks are XP related.
Yep, I tried a few of those tricks on my home computer and my Xp is also now clearly a bit more responsive… Strangely the indexing service (one of the tips) was already turned of, which I think is weird, since I hadn’t done it. But maybe it’s because I always use agent ransack and not the crappy “search” -function in xp?
But anyway, I recommend trying that stuff too! Nice tip It-Alien!
Tweak #3: Use NTFS
NTFS is the recommended file system for Windows XP and provides a number of benefits in terms of functionality, security, stability, availability, reliability, and performance.
the last point is wrong. NTFS isn’t faster … it’s a little bit slower but more secure … and never try to change the cluster size (for more speed) of your NTFS WinXP boot-hd/partition … i had very bad experience with this.
just my 2 cents
and for all this tweaks you can use X-setup … a great tweaking utility
http://www.x-setup.net/
thanks.
it really make a difference.
tho i already read before about the indexing service,
but the registration tweaks really did the trick. 
and disable the System Restore Service … another big resources killer of winXP.
also give a look to this freebie for system manteinance
BE REALLY CAREFUL WITH REGISTRY CLEANERS
… there are so much tools of this kind available and the most are more registry destroyers than registry cleaners!!!
i can recommend this ones:
Registry Mechanic
Norton Utilities
TuneUP 2004 (but be a little bit careful - it’s not so perfect as it looks)
There are some tweaks to watch out for…
Processor Scheduling
“This part of the tweak is impossible to explain without getting into the technical ins and outs of binary values, bit pairs and bit masks. Suffice it to say, this part of the tweak forces short, variable length processor timeslices to be allocated to foreground processes three times more often than those timeslices given to background processes.”
Don’t forget that Renoise runs with VSTI’s and even though Renoise may get a higher priority, the vsti’s probably will get less.
There is a chance you won’t harmonise your cpu responsiveness when using a large sum of VST effects and or VST instruments as they will form the background process.
Memory Management: Kernel Paging and Cache Tuning
[i]The “DisablePagingExecutive” entry in the registry prevents the kernel (the core of the XP OS) from being rolled out to the page file. The effect of this part of the tweak is to cause the OS to cache the OS Kernel and its entourage to RAM instead of to disk, which makes XP far more responsive.
It makes XP far more responsive, but at the cost of RAM that may be utilised better by other apps (like sampler VST’s etc.) if they had that space.
The “LargeSystemCache” registry entry forces XP to allocate all but 4MB of system memory, that is system memory, not avaliable RAM, to the file system cache. The remaining 4MB of system memory is used for disk caching, though XP will allocate more memory if it is needed.[/i]
This last option is specifically a better performance improvement worth the consideration.
[b]all with all there were still two tweaks that looked handy.
Some of the tweaks were already performed by Tuneup Utilities (which was also advised by Alexander)
I don’t know if it is perfect or not perfect, i had no serious incidents with the registry cleaner and registry defragmentation tool of it.
On top of that, O&O defrag can also reorder your files in a better manner than the internal disk defragmenter of Mickey-soft will do.
Ofcourse, there are far superior defrag tools, but most of them are aimed for server and SAN environments and are much too complex for the average home system.[/b]
This link also provides some useful hints on optimising your system, and also includes a tweak to give priority to certain IRQs. The IRQ for CMOS clock seems to be a safe bet, but i’m going to try the same IRQ as my soundcard to see if renoise suffers less.
*edit: WooHoo! 100th post 