When you first install WindowsXP, the software loads in a lot of services by default and many of these services are not needed. Services like Automatic Updates, System Restore and Help and Support are not always needed. If you don't use it, disable it.

To disable services, you must have Administrative Rights and have the ability to access Administrative Tools . Once inside there, go to Services and disable what you don't use. If you're not sure what it does, don't disable it, messing around with Services can ruin an OS!

Here are a few services that you'll want to disable when benchmarking for 3DMark...

Automatic Updates
Error Reporting Service
Event Log
Fast User Switching Compatibility
IMAPI CD-Burning COM Services
Indexing Service
Help and Support
Messenger
Performance Logs and Alerts
Remote Registry
Shell Hardware Detection
System Event Notification
System Restore Service
Task Scheduler
Themes

Please note though, some of the above services may be needed for your everyday use, so if you find your computer acting weird, reenable the above services.

Another small tweak you can do to enhance the performance of your system is going to the Advanced Tab inside your System Properties. From there, click the Settings tabs in the Performance section and select Best Performance .

Let's check out how much performance we gain from those few tweaks.

Hmm, I'm actually very surprised that the point increase wasn't higher. Only a about 75 points.

Now it's time to install a specific videocard tweaker, since the videocard is an ATi Radeon 97000 we decided to use Rage3D Tweaker. After it's installed we set it to run in 3DMark2001 mode which optimizes the drivers for that benchmark.

While 3DMark was running it was obvious that Rage3D Tweaker lowered the LoD (Level of Detail) because the image was quite a bit "blurrier" compared to driver defaults. The IQ though was still better then nVIDIA cards when using Best Performance in the drivers.

Using Rage3D Tweaker to change the LoD got us another 150 points.