I found a reference today to Eboostr, a product that adds Readyboost-like capability to XP. Essentially it uses a USB 2.0 flash drive to speed up your system, although it's unclear whether it's using it for virtual memory, a disk cache, or both.

I found a review.

Well, I had my first major experience with Nlite and Windows XP tonight. I installed a new 160 GB Seagate hard drive into Mom's Compaq Evo 510 and I used Nlite to slipstream SP2 into Windows XP, since SP2 is necessary to properly use a drive that big.

The resulting image was far too big to fit on a CD, so I started pulling stuff out.

Problem: I have to get three Windows servers patched up to date tomorrow. I found this out about 3 this afternoon.

Second problem: No network connection to the outside world, under any circumstances.

Third problem: Any rewritable media used on said servers must be destroyed after use.

Impossible? Believe it or not, no.

I've seen this done before, but this is currently the only guide I can find to Installing Windows XP from a USB drive.

If your computer has USB 2.0 ports and can boot off USB (true of most recent PCs), this is not only convenient--it should also be very fast.

So I'm sitting at this 2 GHz PC with 2 GB of RAM and a reasonably fast video card, and the audio in Railroad Tycoon 3 skips and sounds a little bit distorted.

It's maddening when the game played fine on 400 MHz systems. I did some digging, and bad audio seems to be a common problem in XP SP2, but solutions are rare.

So I got fed up with my network connections dropping 80% of the way through copying 25-megabyte files halfway across the world. I've been using Robocopy, but without any command line options, it just starts over again.

I did a little digging and found the /z switch, which is supposed to make it pick up where it left off. It introduces a little overhead, but I can live with that. It's better than copying the files 1 1/2 times.

Finding out about it was the amusing part.

If you remember the days of DOS, you know the difference between COPY and XCOPY. For those times when XCOPY won't cut it, there's ROBOCOPY, part of the Windows resource kit.

If you're in need of some extra money and you're computer-savvy, the scumbags of the earth have a deal for you.

You see, they load unwitting computer owners' PCs up with loads of junk, and they can render a new, state of the art computer useless very quickly.

If you can learn to clean up the mess, you can probably have as much after-hours work as you want.

Dell offering PCs free of bloatware and crapware reminds me of the ultimate optimization tip, the thing you should do on Day 1 immediately after unboxing your PC.

Reformat the hard drive and start over.

Way back when the majority of people used 56K modems to access the Internet and I was writing my book on system performance, a favorite computer enthusiast's tweak was the MTU.

Don't make the mistake I made though, and assume MTU adjustments are just for people with modems. They aren't. I just adjusted the MTU on two of my Windows boxes and the speed improvement was dramatic.