I have yet to see settings here that if disabled you will benefit. To benefit here in my most recent performance advantage, I pointed my swap space onto my SSD, where I have a 500GB Master SATA HDD drive with the OS and 90GB SSD as drive X: where I run large install games from, and now swap space is accessed faster.
If you want to disable stuff to gain performance, I'd look into msconfig to remove any bloatware that have unneeded services running that eat up CPU and Memory.
And running Windows XP with a spinning hard drive with no SSD advantage, you want to make sure you have as little fragmentation as possible, and adequate CPU and RAM.
*You also if you really want to squeeze out maximum performance and will be using the system offline for stand alone games or online willing to be at risk for various security vulnerabilities. You can run as clean of a build with as few patches as possible.
I had a laptop that was a Dell Pentium III 600Mhz with 384MB Ram and 40GB IDE HD that runs quick on Windows XP Pro SP2 clean build direct from OEM CD. After the 100+ updates and Service Pack 3, this system ran at a snails pace. So having created a ghost image of this system from clean XP Pro SP2 build into 2 CD's, I reverted the 40GB hard drive back to Windows XP Pro SP2 and got my speed back. I then documented available RAM and CPU at Idle. I then ran passmark benchmark on my system to get results. I then performed all the same updates all over again and documented my CPU at idle and available RAM, and ran passmark benchmark all over again. Passmark showed a serious hit in performance. You really didnt need passmark benchmark to know it was strugging with running patched to the latest XP Pro, but I wanted a measurement to go by. I then reverted again to XP Pro SP2 and use this laptop as an offline coding beater for C++ and perl since it runs fast on XP Pro SP2 clean build.
*If I ever find a 256MB PC100 stick for the laptop for free, I will bring the RAM from 384MB ( 256+128 sticks ) to 512MB ( 2 x 256mb sticks ) and retest. The fact is that this may improve performance some since the available memory did dive to around 48MB with SP3 and all latest updates, and prior to that I had 128MB free with clean build SP2. But the amount of lag I had with it with SP3 patched to latest vs SP2 clean build to me and 48MB still being available to me means that the OS became far less optimized for speed in favor of security. On modern hardware it might not seem that drastic, but on a ( single core mobile )Pentium III 600Mhz it was like night and day difference in performance.
Long time ago one of my friends insisted on Windows 2000 Pro over Windows XP Pro for gaming. Mainly because the OS required lesser resources so that the game was given more processing power and memory to execute on an average home computer. As time went on and newer CPU's came out though with dual-cores, this changed the older previous OS advantage with lesser OS support for the newer technologies that became available like HT ( hyperthreading ) such as linked here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1002644/windows-2000-and-the-hyperthreading-nightmare When my friend upgraded to a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 HT, which came with XP Pro (might have been SP0 or SP1, for around $1000 just for the tower from HP when new, it was to tap into the newer CPU speed advantage as well as dual-channel memory vs single-channel, DDR vs SDRAM, and games that would no longer run well on an aged single core Pentium 4 1.5Ghz.
According to this site:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/139911/early_tests_say_sp3_speeds_windows_xp.htmlThey claim XP SP3 made MS Office Run 10% faster. While it made "Office" run better. My laptop still points to greater hardware resource demand when using SP3 over SP2. Maybe I should install Office on this laptop and see if its 10% faster.
Not going to waste my time since i know that will not be the case.
Lastly, the latest speed advantage I made to my system which is not Windows XP, but this technology is available for Windows XP, is DataRAM RAMdisk. It allows you to put data onto an allocated portion of RAM that acts like an SSD, but much faster than an SSD with information already in RAM ready to be addressed. DataRAM has a free for personal use license available in which you can make portion of your RAM act like a virtual hard drive. You can run applications that read/write data from here and have the advantage over read/writes from a slow spinning hard drive. I tested this out on my system with 4GB Ram running Windows 7 64-bit and made 2GB of my RAM into this virtual hard drive RAMDisk. I then placed games that would fit within a 2GB space into it and ran them. "Talk about fast, just about instant launches of software and games". If you have anything you want to improve the performance of software wise, you could go this route if you have extra RAM available. The only pro/con to this software by design and architecture is that RAM in home computers doesnt hold data when powered off, so this software creates a mirror copy onto your hard drive of this 2GB RAMdisk space as an image file. When booting windows or shutting down windows, the computer doesnt shutdown until after the information from RAM has been written to the new image file that overwrites the old image file of the RAMDisk. Depending on speed of hardware and size of RAMdisk space this can be a few minute wait at boot up and shutdown for the processes to complete. BUT once windows is running, anything inside that RAMdisk is accessed and written to Super Fast!!!
