MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

How to Enhance System Performance
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You can enhance system performance in several ways. First, if your computer has multiple
hard disk controllers, you can create a paging file on a disk on each controller.
Distributing information across multiple paging files improves performance because
Windows can read and write from disks on different controllers simultaneously. When
attempting to write to the paging file, VMM tries to write the page data to the paging
file on the controller that is the least busy.
Second, you can enhance performance by moving the paging file off the drive that
contains the Windows XP Professional %systemroot% folder (by default, the Windows
folder), which avoids competition between the various reading and writing requests. If
you place a paging file on the Windows XP Professional system partition to facilitate
the recovery feature, which is discussed in the section entitled “How to Configure Startup
and Recovery Settings” later in this lesson, you can still increase performance by creating
multiple paging files. Because the VMM alternates write operations between paging
files, the paging file on the boot partition is accessed less frequently.
Third, you can enhance system performance by setting the initial size of the paging
file to the value displayed in the Virtual Memory dialog box’s Maximum Size box,
which eliminates the time required to enlarge the file from the initial size to the maximum
size.
Note When applying new settings, be sure to click Set before clicking OK.
How to Configure User Profiles
Each user account in Windows XP has an associated user profile that stores userspecific
configuration settings, such as a customized desktop or personalized application
settings. Understanding how user profiles function and how to control them
lets you effectively manage the user’s desktop environment.
Windows XP supports three types of user profiles:
Lesson 3 Configuring System Settings
■ Local A local user profile is available only on the system on which it was created.
A unique local user profile is created and stored on each computer that a
user logs on to.
■ Roaming Roaming profiles, which are stored in a shared folder on a network
server, are accessible from any location in the network.
■ Mandatory Mandatory user profiles are roaming user profiles that users cannot
make permanent changes to. Mandatory profiles are used to enforce configuration
settings.