Trying to go one step further in improving my PC’s performance, some days ago I made the following changes in the Registry:
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1 – For faster opening of most used programs:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management:
LargeSystemCache – Set to 1 (default = 0)
2 – To clear the Swap File on shutdown:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management:
ClearPageFileAtShutdown – Set to 1 (default = 0)
(The idea on this particular change was to let it be applied once so that pagefile.sys didn’t keep growing beyond its 1.6 Gb -despite the system would create it again at startup with no less than 700Mb, but anyway, with a lot less clutter- and then revert immediately the value to 0, since leaving it enabled increases significantly the shutdown and startup times).
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I did one thing wrong: I didn’t take care to make one change at a time, reboot, see what happened and then make the other one (and reboot), but made them both at a time and rebooted, so that I can’t tell which (if any) caused me the problem I describe next:
As I have said, I made the two changes to the Registry and when I rebooted, was unable to start Windows, because it “needed to be activated”. At first I hit “Cancel”, but it freezed and didn’t logon, so I tried with “OK” and nothing happened, whatever the startup mode I used: all the available safe modes, last known good config, etc.
The question is:
Can anybody confirm that these changes (related to Memory management) have something to do with Win XP losing its former Activation status?
Thanks a lot