Tuning WinXP for Sage TV

[rak306]

I've seen several references to removing non-essential winXP programs to get the best performance for SageTV from less powerful PCs.

What is the minimal WinXP installation, and how do you go about setting it up?

Rick

[justme]

Like many things it varies from user to user depending on needs. The obvious one is too start(if you can) with a clean install and only put on what is needed for SageTV. WinXP, MB drivers, PCI card drivers, DX9.0b, Java 1.4.2, PVR drivers and SageTV. Disable all unused onboard harware devices/ports(serial, parallel, Raid, whatever you aren't using) in your motherboard's BIOS before installing Windows. If you are coming from a clean install it's always a good idea to make a backup image of C: using "Drive Image" or "Ghost" at this point, so you can easily restore without needing to jump thru window hoops again. From that point on try and only install what is needed. For instance having too many video codecs can actually cause small quirks in many media programs. So if you already know which video codecs you like using, just install them.

As for trimming down WinXP's always existant bloat... Try XPLite for a great tool on trimming down XP. The free/trial does alot, so you may not need to but it. To identify which windows services you can turn off on your system go to BlackViper.com. He has a great page explaining each service, what it does, whether you likely need it, and how to properly disable them.

Another thing I like to do is plan out my partitions. This allows me to keep my stuff better organized. It also means you can setup Sage with it's own partition to use for recording. This has several advantages. You can format it to NTFS 64K clusters like Frey recommends. You can easily turn off programs like "recycle bin" that can interfere with Sage managing diskspace for this partition.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I hope something above was helpfull. Even if you don't want to do a clean install then XPlite and BlackViper can still help. You can also use WinXP's Disk Management tools to reformat an existing partition to NTFS 64K, just be aware that this will wipe any data on that partition. You'd need a tool like PartitionMagic to do such a thing without destroying data. You could also use PartitionMagic to add a new partition for Sage using your drive's free space if you don't already have a suitable partition. The beauty of a planned clean install, is you don't need PartitionMagic.

[rak306]

justme wrote: "...make a backup image of C: using "Drive Image" or "Ghost"..."

Are these part of windows or programs I need to get?

Your advice helps alot. Thanks,

Rick

[justme]

Sorry about that.

Drive Image and Ghost aren't parts of Windows. They are sepereate programs, but you don't have to get one(both do the same thing). I just find that having Drive Image(my choice of the two) helps me get my computer back up and running very fast. I like to clean house on my computer once a year or so and a program like this really helps to avoid the steps that are common to almost every install.

You can find the official site for Drive Image here. But if you look around you can often find a package that include both PartitionMagic and Drive Image together for about the same price.

Here's the official site for Ghost.
If you look at the links carefully you'll see they both go to Symantec. PartitionMagic and Drive Image were both made by PowerQuest, but was recently purchased by Symantec. There's been alot of speculation about which(if only one) product will be continued. I'm pretty sure I read that it would be DriveImage, but I'm not sure. Anyway it's my personal favorite and both would still have warranty coverage.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by rak306
justme wrote: "...make a backup image of C: using "Drive Image" or "Ghost"..."

Are these part of windows or programs I need to get?

Your advice helps alot. Thanks,

Rick

I'll throw in my vote for Acronis True Image/Partition Expert. I used to be a die hard Powerquest DriveImage fan, but I can't stand V2i protector. PQ seems to have gone to crap since they were bought my Symantec (IMO).

As for tuning, I'll pretty much echo what justme said. Your best bet is to just go with a clean Windows install, just the drivers/apps you absolutely need. For partitions, I have one small partition for Windows (~5GB), one large one for SageTV, and one each for my music/vids/pictures/msc crap. When I get around to building my workstation/server, I'll move everything but the Windows/Sage partions to it.

One more thing I do is to uninstall Windows/MSN Messenger