Windows ME Performance Optimization

Windows Millennium Edition (ME) comes with a feature that I have determined to be a memory/CPU/disk hog. Many of you can do without this feature as it is really intended to be used by our friends the "average consumers". Before I get into how to disable this service, I'll go into what it is and what it does.

System Restore: Borrowed from the Rescue Disk concept that many of us are familiar with in Windows NT/2000. What this does is allows you to take snapshots of your system files and registry at regular intervals so that when you break something you can go back to a "Last Known Good" configuration. That would be swell if that's all this thing did. Unfortunately, the thing also does snapshots at regular automaticintervals. From what I observed, this appears to happen at least once a day. The problem is that this means that the application is running in the background all the time, may run when other mission-critical applications (like Tribes2) are trying to access the CPU, and takes up disk space with every snapshot.

To diable this feature, right-click on your "My Computer" icon and click "Properties". Then go to the "Performance" tab and click the "File System" button. Go to the "Troubleshooting" tab and check the box marked "Disable System Restore". Reboot your computer.

Disabling this feature makes things a bit more snappy for me. Additionally, it freed up 1.5GB of disk space on my computer.

<p align=justify><font color="#ff0000">As with all tips, tricks, and downloads that you might get from this board and any other resources belonging to the August Knights, this comes with no warranty whatsoever. Whatever [stupid] thing you decide to do with your property is your responsibility. Improper implementation of any hardware/software modification that we point out is neither recommended nor condoned by the August Knights. In short, if you break it, it ain't our problem.</font></p>

[AK]Zorro

Chief Operations Officer
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