Test Setup

Cycles

These processes function on a three-day cycle. Windows cannot possibly create an intelligent arrangement of the disk without having any sort of user history. Microsoft claims that this feature can improve system performance by up to 10%. XP accomplishes this by moving files that are accessed in conjunction with another closer together, and if there is room XP will also move these files to the outer edge of the drive, where seek times drop.

The layout history of your usage can be accessed in a file located in your windows directory - c:\windows\prefetch\layout.ini. This same procedure is also used to improve boot times. After a certain number of boots, XP realizes what files are used during the boot process. XP then proceeds to place those files in better areas on the drive.

Magic!

As you may have noticed, these three-day cycles aren't exactly beneficial to someone who has under a week in which to test and write an article. Fortunately, Microsoft allowed for a manual calling of these tasks. If you go to the "run" command in your Start Menu, you to can run these idle tasks, simply type the following string in: rundll32.exe advapi32.dll, ProcessIdleTasks. This will then call the disk optimization software into effect, if you happen to open Task Manager before you do this, you can watch your CPU utilization go through the roof.

To use this command effectively, you will have to install whatever programs or benchmarks you usually use. Then you will have to run those programs at least once, so that some history is created. Then you can run the command to improve access times, and hopefully improve scores.

Testing Quirks

After doing all these fun things in order to test in WinXP, we ran into some rather interesting situations. While running the productivity tests, the benchmark program would halt after finishing a single run and proceed to tell me that it detected idle tasks, that were anything but. While these didn't seem to affect the test run itself, as the test had just completed a cycle, we found it rather interesting that the total time required to test increased by a substantial amount in comparison to Win2K or Win98SE.

Now onto the tests!