Who doesn't want another couple of seconds shaved off their startup or application load time, or an extra few frames per second in their favorite game?

Windows tweakers will go to outrageous tweaks to "tune up" their systems, but how many of those tweaks actually do any good? The truth: Just about none.

Lifehacker has one of the most comprehensive looks at the common performance tweak advice I've seen. It pretty much dismisses everything you might have heard as bunk. Among the highlights:

• > Disabling QoS will not speed up your computer at all. (One rumor says that Windows reserves "20 percent of your bandwidth" for Windows Update... which is pretty absurd if you think about it.
• > Clearing out the Prefetch in Windows XP won't speed up your machine, either. This one's been going around the block for years. Deleting the Prefetch folder files simply won't help anything.
• > "Optimizing your RAM" is useless. Plenty of downloadable products make great claims that they can speed up your system if you just run a simple application to "optimize your RAM." The same logic applies here that does to those selling gizmos to give your car better mileage: If they really worked, the manufacturer (in this case, Microsoft) would have included the software in Windows to begin with, right?
• > Turning off System Restore won't speed up your system. (It will save you hard drive space, though.)

A couple of points on the post are a little more controversial.

Yes, turning off services can destabilize your system, but there is plenty of stuff in the average Windows services list that is total junk: Various quick-launchers, duplicate management utilities, and the like. The problem comes in knowing what you can disable and what you need to keep your machine stable. Lifehacker offers good advice in suggesting you show only non-Windows services before you start hacking away, but its suggestion that some people may actually want to hang on to the useless Windows Defender is silly. Contrary to Lifehacker's advice, disabling unneeded services will likely make your rig more stable, not less.

Finally there's the issue of registry cleaner utilities. Lifehacker says never to use them, but I've seen the proof in the pudding: Seriously slow systems can benefit from a registry cleaning, at least when it comes to startup time. Yes, your best advice is to upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, but I disagree that Registry cleaners never work.

Give the story a spin here.