Win XP comes with many inbuilt performance
monitoring applications that constantly
examine many parts of the system. This
information can be of real use to a system
administrator for collecting performance
statistics. However, for a home user, these
statistics hold no value and since the
monitoring happens all the time, it consumes a
good deal of system resources. “Disk
monitoring”, for example, happens in the
background, and turning it off is advisable if
you will not be using the performance
monitoring applications. To turn it off, type
in “diskperf -N” at a command prompt. To bring
up the command prompt: go to Start>Run, type
in “cmd” and press [Enter].