I am about to build my very first homebuilt system. I have an article about it going here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] uild-order

My question now is this:

After searching the forums here I am looking for ways to make my new fast system even faster thru optimizing Windows. I had done this a long time ago on my win 98 system and had huge gains in performance. What I am looking for now is how to do the same thing in XP Pro (since I think that is the OS I am going to get) I would appreciate any feedback on this topic at all.

What I am looking for is boot up speed ups and how to make the OS and games run faster without sacrificing stability too much. I am not into overclocking and stuff right now. I will work on that kinda thing in the near future. Any links to good articles (been searching them but some are just too hard to follow) or anything you guru's know from personal experience would be great. Thank you again for all of your very vaulable input!

Have a great day!

try blackviper.com for some help or possibly regedit.com.
Just be careful to not shoot yourself in the foot.
Another helpful suggestion would be getting a copy of Norton ghost to get a image of your system at its cleanest to save you some time having to reload a bunch of stuff if something goes wrong.

Here are my reg tweaks copy and paste save as with extension as xxx.reg and you can merge with your system. Copy the entire lines including Windows Registry editor Version 5.00 each new file will start with that WREV5.00
100% checked for system performance
1 app hang time reduced:menuspeed with the menushowdelay if you set to quick your mouse clicks become fast so you may need to play with this for your system 0 being nodelay
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"AutoEndTasks"="1"
"HungAppTimeout"="1000"
"WaitToKillAppTimeout"="2000"
"MenuShowDelay"="200"
2 file system performance:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem]
"NtfsMftZoneReservation"=dword:00000004
"NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001
"ConfigFileAllocSize"=dword:00000200
3 memory performance

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

4 security redirect

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
"EnableICMPRedirect"=dword:00000000
"DisableTaskOffload"=dword:00000000

I've got more but have not got the ready yet.
create this delete.bat file and in gpedit.msc, window setting, startup/shutdown and in the shut down add the location of the delete.bat file you created, a good place to save the file is in windows directory
RD /S /q "C:\Documents and Settings\blazer\Local Settings\History"
RD /S /q "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\History"
RD /S /q "C:\Documents and Settings\blazer\Local Settings\Temp"
tweaks came from a long list from every tweak site and these are the ones that do improve system performance

this tweak has given me a 10ms better ping when playing a game + smoother gameplay
create a bat file in the game folder, for example, I play bf1942 so bf1942.bat is the name, then create a desttop short cut after adding this to the bat file
cmd /c start /High bf1942