Any traders use it? Supposedly it's much faster than regular XP-32 because all the non-essential stuff is pulled out of it, and it goes up through Service Pack 3 as well, so I was contemplating giving it a whirl...
there's several optimized xp authors most notable the tinyxp versions, they're all bootleg and watch out for viruses, trojans keyloggers etc in the download just disabling many services will speed-up xp and you can create your own optimized version of xp pro using nlite: http://www.nliteos.com/ see their forum and others also google 'optimizing xp pro' etc 'slipstreaming' to include sps and other sw you want to include in the boot disk
i did use tinyXP for a long time and it almost always worked like a charm. However, those ''optimized'' versions of windows xp were useful back in the days when we had 256MB ram and 1ghz processors, where every spare bit of memory and cpu cycle was important. With today's computers running 2+gb ram and multicore processors. The performance improvement might be totally unnoticeable. keep also in mind that, from those tweaked windows versions, some apparently unnecessary windows component that have been removed may actually prove quite necessary. And it will always happens when your system is all set, meaning configured to your likings, all your software installed, everything working 100%. 2 exemples i went through, with tinyXP i recently discovered that i coudnt use a remote desktop software called radmin. something in tinyXP has been removed that is required for radmin to run. with the version called ''performance edition'', essential advanced networking components were removed so it was useless in a business scenario. i strongly recommend you stick with a regular xp install CD. if you can, switch to xp x64 edition if your cpu supports it, i noticed a immediate performance gain.
Valid points. I'll probably go the safer route and like you said, with quad core & 4gig ram, doubt I'll notice any diff. XP-64 I heard has similar driver incompatibility issues as Vista-64 does though. Does XP-64 cause any problems? Or driver concerns, etc.? My hardware should support ALL the latest & greatest as I'm building a new PC now with a lot of new components (i.e. Q9550, ASUS P5QE, Mushkin DDR2 800 2x2gb, 2 ATI 3650's for my 3 monitors, etc...)
xp64 is much worse than vista/ws2008 64 because it was "abandoned." Stick with xp32 or go to vista/ws64.
Related point: As a reformed tweaker I now stick with standard out of the box settings in XP e.g MTU, because that is what most programs eg TWS 'expect' or are optimised for.