I'm trying to get the most out of my laptop computer (windows xp). What processor scheduling, memory usage, and virtual memory setting can help me to optomize its performance?

That would depend upon your processor, memory, shared memory with video card (if applicable) , hardware infrastructure (IDE versus SATA), how configurable your BIOS is, and many other factors as well.

You may want to take a peek at this thread. It has a great deal of relevant and useful information.

CAGL,
IQ

I have an old laptop with an Intel Pentium II processor 330 MHZ 256 MB of Ram. System Memory is 640 KB. Extended Memory is 255 MB. I'm not sure about the sharing of memory with the video card (the BIOS says that video expansion is disabled). Hard Drive is 60 GB IDE. The BIOS Revision is CI.M7.13. The settings I'm wanting to know are in the control panel under system | performance | advanced. Any help would be appreciated. Let me know if any more specs that I'm overlooking would help.

Right. Having just junked a very similar laptop and Desktop (Compaq Armada 1500C with a Celeron 333 CPU and an eMachines Celeron 400 desktop) I can tell ya that your OS choice is going to make a world of difference here. So is your HD choice - plugging in a 4200 RPM HD versus a 5400 RPM drive versus a 7200 RPM drive makes a world of difference because the BUS speeds, although slow as molasses, are still not the limiting factor in these machines - the HD speed is one of the biggest.

What OS are you using, anyway?

And do read that thread above for more information.

5400 RPM Hard Drive Windows XP Service Pack 1

So, you have 256 MB RAM, not sure how much is being shared with your video card (but I am guessing no more than 16 MB) and you want to maximize performance out of Win XP SP1.

Let me be frank with you - yes, XP runs on that machine (again, I had a very comparable machine to it) and I even tested XP on a much older machine - but the sheer lack of processing power is going to mean very, very subjective changes in terms of performance on your machine.

That being said, I know that making a manually created Page file of about 3 times your memory (750 MB) would do for starters, (make that the minimum - XP prefers 1 GB of RAM over anything else, and will page what it does not need when it does not need it - but the large your initial size of the Page file the easier it is to prevent it from getting fragmented on your HD).

Also, keep your HD defragmented as much as possible - your HD is already slow, and your system already slower, so any performance degradation is going to be felt throughout the system.

I will have access to an XP - based PC tomorrow and can add some items that you might want to try out, but keep in mind my earlier caveat.

I appreciate the feedback.