Disk
VFAT Contiguous Allocation Size
Fragmentation occurs over time, as programs read from and write to the hard disk. Eventually, files must be stored in noncontiguous sectors on a disk. Fragmentation does not affect the validity of the information, but it takes much longer for the computer to read and write fragmented files. Under MS-DOS, the file system began allocating the first available space found on the disk, which ensured a great deal of disk fragmentation and related performance problems. By default under Windows 9x-ME, the file system first tries to allocate space in the first contiguous 512 KBytes to prevent extreme fragmentation. Increasing this value can result in even less fragmentation and improved performance.
Read-Ahead Threshold
Read-Ahead Threshold is the amount of additional bytes that will be read when a application reads data in sequence. It is meant to improve read performance by anticipating the next read. This works in many cases, unfortunately the performance will decrease if more than one application accesses the hard drive at the same time.
IO Page Buffers
This setting specifies the number of page buffers used to store asynchronous read and write pages when accessing the hard drive. This setting is used only if you are using 32-Bit Disk Access and a permanent swap file. Increasing this value can improve Windows performance.
Miscellaneous
Hung App Timeout
Windows waits by default a long time to finally acknowledge that a particular program is "Not responding", and only after that allowing you to shut it down by clicking the End Task button.
Wait to Kill App Timeout
This value sets the timeout until Windows shuts down/restarts, while trying to exit all open programs.
Show Menu Delay
Decreasing this value makes the Start Menu cascading menus appear more quickly.