You can change display driver settings on the fly in Windows NT. Select Control Panel / Display and you'll get a Display Settings dialog. To change the screen resolution, adjust the Desktop Area slide control. To change the display color depth, select an entry from the Color Palette listing. You can also set the font size and display refresh frequency. Click on the Test button to see if the new settings work correctly, and when you're satisfied, click on OK. Restart Windows NT to install the new settings.
Compression-able
Increase disk capacity in Windows NT 3.51 with NTFS' built-in compression feature. Compression is transparent to the user, and you can set it on a per-directory or per-file basis. You control it from NT File Manager's File / Compress and File / Uncompress menu entries, or with the COMPACT command-line function. The performance is good enough to use full-time on both workstations and servers.
Edit .INIs in a Jiffy
You can adjust most settings with your .INI files or even more easily through Control Panel. But when you need to make low-level changes, you can get at the equivalent information using the Windows NT Registry. The key KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ Current Version \ IniFileMapping contains subkeys that represent each .INI file in the system and provides the equivalent Registry entries. For instance, the SYSTEM.INI subkey contains a 386Enh line, which lists the mapping as SYS:Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ WOW \ 386Enh. "SYS:" indicates the entry is for the system rather than a user. If you examine HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ WOW, you'll see a 386Enh subkey containing the information that would be in the [386Enh] section of Windows 3.1's SYSTEM.INI file.
Font-asize
The system font Windows NT uses (VGA by default) may be unreadable on systems with very-high-resolution displays. For a more comfortable font, edit the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ GRE_Initialize. You'll find entries for fixed, system and OEM fonts, and can change these to any font from the .FON files in the \WINNT\SYSTEM or \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory. The VGA*.FON, 8514*.FON and (on RISC systems) JAZZ*.FON files generally work best, though, so you may want to pick one other than the one you're already using--possibly in a different size. Once you make the change, restart your computer.
Hike the Audit Trail
The Windows NT Event Viewer application can provide an audit trail of access to files and directories in New Technology File System (NTFS) disk partitions. This can be useful for debugging performance problems or for security purposes. Enable auditing (it's disabled by default) by running User Manager and selecting Policies / Audit. You can choose a variety of events to audit and can audit them based on success or failure. Next, run File Manager, select the NTFS file or directory you want to audit and select Security / Auditing. You can then add the names of particular users or groups whose access you want to audit, and specify which events to record. Results of the audit will appear as events in the Event Viewer's Security log.
Memory to the Max
Did you know that NT by default only uses 256 KB of L2 cache regardless how much L2 you have? What a waste!
The registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ SecondLevelDataCache defaults to zero which means 256KB. Change the DWORD value to 0x200 for 512KB or 0x400 for systems with 1MB of L2 cache.
Before modifying the registry be sure to run "rdisk /s" to save the current configuration. I've made this change on a few servers and workstations. It makes a noticeable difference.
Monitor Disk Performance
You can monitor the performance of both physical and logical disk drives using Windows NT's Performance Monitor application. First, turn on disk performance counters (they're turned off by default) by starting a Windows NT Command Prompt and typing diskperf -y at the command line. After restart, use the various counters in the Performance Monitor's Physical Disk and Logical Disk objects to monitor performance. In particular, look at the Avg. Disk Bytes / Transfer and Avg. Disk Seconds / Transfer. If you divide the former by the latter, you'll get an average disk transfer rate in Bytes / Sec. Check these values periodically to monitor disk fragmentation and other factors that may inhibit good disk performance.
Tune a Server
Improve Windows NT and Windows NT Advanced Server systems' performance by adjusting the way the network Server object uses memory. Start Control Panel / Network, select the Server object and click on the Configure button. You then have four choices for optimizing the server. Minimize Memory Used is a good choice for workstations and servers on very small networks (up to five sessions). Balance is good for servers on medium-sized networks (up to 64 sessions). Maximize Throughput for File Sharing is best for Advanced Server systems that provide resource sharing for large networks (more than 64 sessions), and Maximize Throughput for Network Applications is best for Advanced Servers like SQL Server that provide application services for large networks. Reboot the computer after you change this setting.
Tune a Swap File
Enhance Windows NT's performance by tuning the size and location of your swap file. First, run Control Panel / System / Virtual Memory to see how the initial size of the swap file is set, and compare with the size of PAGEFILE.SYS. If larger than the initial size, Windows NT has expanded it dynamically. It's probably set too small, so set it to a larger size. You can also examine the Committed Bytes and Commit Limit Counters in the Performance Monitor Memory object. When Committed Bytes approaches the Commit Limit, the page file will expand dynamically, slowing performance. High-performance systems--especially servers--can run better by distributing page files across multiple disk drives. Use Control Panel / System / Virtual Memory to add a page file for each available disk. This works only for systems with multiple hard disks. Systems with multiple partitions (and logical drives) on one hard disk perform most efficiently with a single swap file.
