Turn Off Unused Win2K Pro Services/Fix a Bad Boot Sector

Last week's column about Windows 2000 Professional performance generated comments from two readers who said they're getting acceptable results from Win2K Pro on notebook PCs with just 64KB of RAM. One thing they did that we didn't do in our performance tests is turn off unused services. You can turn off unused services using the Services applet in the Administrative Tools section of the Win2K Control Panel. Many standard Win2K Pro services are intended for computers running on a network; disabling those services on systems that don't require them—such as notebook PCs—can save significant RAM.

Last month, I wrote a column about dual-booting Win2K Pro and Windows NT, in which I discussed problems with restoring a corrupted Win2K boot sector after installing NT. I've now discovered how to repair the boot sector—and it's easy, particularly if you have a system that supports booting from the CD-ROM (if not, you'll need the setup disks). Simply insert your Win2K Pro CD-ROM, boot it to start Win2K setup, and select the option to repair your existing Win2K installation using the emergency disk method. Don't worry if you don't actually have an emergency disk—you won't need it to fix the boot sector. I've tried this method on two systems that I rendered unbootable using NT 4.0 setup—and it worked without a hitch.