PC Hacks

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:

1. Start the Registry Editor by opening the Start menu, then selecting Run.

2. Type in regedit and then click OK.

3. Navigate through the registry tree to the following subkey:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\
   Memory Management

4. Change the DisablePagingExecutive entry to 1. The complete registry information is:

   Value Name: DisablePagingExecutive
   Data Type: REG_DWORD 
   Data: 0 or 1 Default

5. Close regedit and reboot.

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 ...