in a week or so i am going to completely wipe my system drive... but i somehow lost a great site and a pdf file on how to optimise xp for recording. do any of you know where i can find these again? thanks!
Check out Black Viper's site (as linked above) and look at his instructions on how to disable unnecessary services. You can turn off half the stuff that runs in the background in Windows.
Also check out Tweak XP for more info on how to turn off fluff and remove unnecessary junk.
I wish there was some sort of "cost/benefit analisys" for each of the tweaks. I like some of the XP fluff and I'm sure some of these things only make a miniscule difference.