How to increase system system performance

I thought I would share this with you all, a few little tricks to boost
Windows performance.

If you have a spare USB flash drive or you are willing to get a cheap say
1GB flash drive.

First we plug in the flash drive.

Go to Disk Manager and assign it a drive letter, like Z: (this is just to
get it out of the way and optional)

Go to Advanced system settings, Evironment variables.

Change the Temp variable under User to Z:\ (I didn't see any point creating
folders, but that's optional)

Change the Temp variable under System variable to Z:\

This will cut down on I/O traffic to the hard drive. Starting an app like
Word, would cause the HD to read the program into memory while at the same
time writing into the drive, temporary files. This causes an I/O queue to
form and degrade Windows performance. By off loading some of the I/O
traffic to another storage device, the hard drive read/write head doesn't
have to move around as much either. All performance gains.

Another trick I tried was moving Windows Search Index to a flash drive, but
it won't let me select even a 16GB flash drive. Even though the Index
doesn't grow beyond 1GB. It's max size seems to be just under 1GB. You can
move to it to a removable drive, though. I rebuilt the Index on an external
500GB USB drive. Again, this cuts down I/O traffic to the internal hard
drive. More performance gain.

Another idea I tried was creating a pagefile on a 16GB USB flash drive. I
found out you can only have 4095MB pagefile or just under 25% of total
capacity. I don't know what the rule of thumb is though, because on the
internal 1TB hard drive I could create up to the max free space, which was
about 700,000GB. Not that I needed that much, but just to test. I'm
actually running with 4GB RAM and no page file, at the moment. Even with
lots of 100MB picture (scanned documents/photos) open, virtual memory wasn't
required. I would like to use most of an 8GB flash drive. Possibly use it
for both temp files and virtual memory.

I don't know if pagefile is the same thing as running ReadyBoost. I don't
think it is, but I will have to look into that. I am not using Readyboost,
since I read it doesn't do much good if you have more than 2GB of RAM.

Now, if you have a 2nd or 3rd internal hard drive, you can create a pagefile
on the 2nd drive and search index on the 3rd or index on 2nd and page file
on 3rd. I highly recommended using a USB drive for temp files. 1-2GB are
pretty cheap. I don't think you need a larger one unless you are working
with full length movies, but I don't for certain.

They do something like this on big database servers, some might refer to as
"mainframes". The index and database are each on their own storage device.
The aggregated bandwidth offers even better performance then RAID and the
best part is you can implement it along side with RAID for insane amount of
storage I/O performance.

Anyways, that's it.

If you need more detailed info on setting this up, leave a little note in
the newsgroup. If I don't get to it, I'm sure someone else will help you
out.