TIP : Thrashing hard drive? Random slowdowns?

OS : Windows XP All

This is a quick tip for those that might have found their hard drive thrashing for long periods of time, or having random slowdowns in games or other apps. First, make sure you've disabled Indexing Service on your drives, and preferabley disabled it in service manager, as this will Index your drive at random intervals too, causing HD activity.

XP is a self-optimising OS, which means that it has its own little agenda where occasionally at "unintrusive" times, such as when your PC is idle (or any other time it feels like it for that matter) It will do tasks like defrag system files, and change startup layouts. This can be rather irritating while playing games and the such, or if you are in the middle of work and performance suddenly goes right down.

This tip will make it do all the tasks it has qued up for the next few hours (if not days). Myself, I do this a few minutes before I'm about to do a lot of gaming. Though, you have to be careful as the command actually starts all the tasks, so if you don't wait until the are finished your game will be slow! This tip was removed from tweakxp.com because the description was incorrect in saying that you should run it right before you started playing a game, which is incorrect as it would use the CPU whilst playing the game, degrading game performance. However, when used properly this can be very useful.

Go Start -> Run and copy paste this :
%windir%\System32\Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks

You hard drive will go crazy for a few minutes, depending on how many tasks are being executed... and you should not try doing anything too taxing on your computer for 20 minutes or so (depending on the spec of your PC).

This should clear the idle tasks list, and XP will have nothing to excecute when it gets bored, at least for a while. Also, if your hard drive has been thrashing recently, after this has finished executing you should find that it stops thrashing due to idle tasks. If it continues to thrash, you most probably have another problem. Running this should eliminate the posibility of XP Optimisations running in the background.