Registry cleaning and disabling certain services may not yield a performance gain. But that *doesn’t* mean there aren’t reasons you’d do both those things.

Registry cleaning or registry modification can be helpful when troubleshooting a problem. Now, generally, this winds up making a specific change rather than relying on a catch-all app, but even the catch-all apps can prevent problems from occurring.

Specific service disabling CAN be used for performance gains and/or troubleshooting. The difference is, you’re disabling something you know is a performance drag or compatibility problem, not just arbitrarily disabling services.

In both these cases, I know these things can matter for doing real-time audio and music performance. But I agree with the article that it’s not sort of randomly applying these techniques and hoping for the best; that’s almost certain not to work.

I recently re-installed XP Home on one of my computers. I also installed a large HOSTS file as a prophylactic measure.

After that, my first web page access (after booting) would take half a minute to resolve its DNS query. After several hours of mucking about (including two system restore rollbacks) I realized I needed to disable (or disable auto-start) the DNS Client service. Problem solved. Ah, the joys of late-night sleep-deprived computer administration!

I understand not everyone believes a large HOSTS file to be a worthwhile preventative measure.

You should use Process Explorer to figure out what service is using all that extra memory. It’s certainly not normal. I suspend and resume all the time on a half-dozen machines here with no symptoms like the ones you describe.

It sounds like that issue might be related to the second problem, in fact. In my case, I actually have *increased* the size of the System Restore reserved area, but I have tons of HDD space and feel it’s best used. If you’re starting to run out, your needs would be different.

Also, I improved my machine’s performance by limiting the system restore size… it started to eat all my spare hard drive space with one image being over 12GB in size.

TTFN