Windows NT Tips


A how to guide for setting up Windows-NT

Compiled by Anthony W. Haukap



Stop Windows NT System Code and Drivers being paged

Normally User-mode & kernel-mode drivers and kernel-mode system code is written to either pageable or non-pageable memory. It is possible to configure NT never to page out drivers and system code to the pagefile that are in the pageable memory area however this should only be done on systems with large amounts of RAM or severe performance problems could develop. Start the registry editor Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ Memory Management Double click on DisablePagingExecutive and set to 1. Click OK (it is of type DWORD so create if it does not exist) Reboot the machine

Control the amount of memory NT uses for file caching

Windows NT does not allow much tuning of caching except for one registry entry. Start the registry editor (regedit.exe) Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ Memory Management Double click on LargeSystemCache and set to 0 to reduce the amount of memory used for file caching. Click OK Close the registry editor If you start the Network control panel applet and select the Services tab you can select Server and click Properties. Select "Maximize Throughput for Network Applications" to use less memory - (this actually sets LargeSystemCache to 0).

Windows NT Support Tools

These are a set of tools used to aid debugging and diagnosis of Windows 3.51 and 4.0 systems. The current version is 1.0 and these tools are free and can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/tools/OEMSupportTools/ EMTools.exe (5.29MB). The support tools consist of 3 programs Kernel Debugger - New debugger extensions to facilitate examination and analysis of a wider range of Kernel data structures than is conveniently possible today, especially when dealing with crash dumps. Pool Enhancements - Tools for memory pool caller-tracking/tail-checking and increasing available pool statistics. Kernel Memory Space Analyzer - A heuristics-based kernel memory crash dump analysis tool to aid in diagnosing memory corruption problems. This tool discovers and analyzes anomalies in the kernel memory space. The download file is self-extracting and detailed instructions are provided in the readme.txt file.

Improve the performance of modem internet connections

By default, NT will use a Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) (packet size) over the path to a remote host of 576. Problems can arise if the data is sent over routes etc that cannot handle data of this size and the packets get fragmented. The parameter EnablePMTUDiscovery set to 1 forces NT to discover the maximum MTU of all connections that are not on the local subnet. To change this perform the following: Start the registry editor (regedit.exe) Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\ Parameters From the Edit menu select New-DWord value Enter a name of EnablePMTUDiscovery and press enter Double click on this new value and set to 1 then click OK Close the registry editor and reboot the machine. By discovering the Path MTU and limiting TCP segments to this size, TCP can eliminate fragmentation at routers along the path that connect networks with different MTUs. Fragmentation adversely affects TCP throughput and network congestion.

Have your mouse pointer jump to the default button of any dialog box

To enable this feature, set the Registry value of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\SnapToDefaultButton to 1. Although it may take a while to get used to this feature, it can be extremely helpful on a high-resolution monitor. Close the registry editor and reboot the machine.

Automatically reboot after a crash (BSOD)

You can force NT to automatically reboot after a crash by setting the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\CrashControl\AutoReboot to 1. Once you've changed this value, NT will reboot after writing the crash log file.