How to best tune a Windows development machine?

How to best tune a Windows PC for development purposes?

Solution 1:

• Disable the NTFS Last Access Time Stamp;
• Turn off indexing and speed up Windows XP; and
• Turn off unnecessary services.

Solution 2:

Either don't install antivirus software or disable scan-on-access (and if not system-wide, then at least for your development directories). This can make a big difference in compile time.

See also this answer.

Solution 3:

There are some utilites to change the ntfs behavior, instead of editing the registry.

fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

put a second disk in the machine, to avoid thrashing