Control Panel Settings
The logic behind some of these tweaks is that these features require CPU utilization and hard drive accesses, both of which will reduce performance when encoding those MPEGx movies. 

Display

Web tab – Remove Active Desktop
   Uncheck “Show web content on my active desktop” 

Effects tab – Remove Visual Effects
    Uncheck “Use transition effects for menus and tooltips”
    Uncheck “Show window content while dragging” 

Settings Tab – Increase the Refresh rate of your monitor.

Select “Advanced”. In the monitor tab, change the Refresh Frequency to the highest usable frequency. You may need to download the Monitor inf files (drivers) from the manufacturer. 

Folder Options
General tab – Remove html content.
    Active Desktop – Use Windows Classic Desktop
    Web View        – Use Windows Classic folders

View Tab – Show all files
    Select “Show all files and folders”
    Uncheck “Hide file extensions for known file types”
    Uncheck “Hide protected Operating System files”

Mouse
Pointers tab – Uncheck “Enable Pointer Shadow”

The only video card that supports a pointer shadow in hardware is the ATI Radeon. I am currently unsure if the GeForce 3 supports this feature.

Phone and Modem Options
Modems tab – Select your modem and select properties
    Modem tab – For “Maximum Port speed”, select the highest available.
    Advanced tab – Advanced Port Settings – Select “Use FIFO buffers”. Set buffers to maximum.

Network and Dial-Up Connections

Right click on your dialup connection and select properties.
    General tab – Select “Configure”
        Maximum Speed – Select highest available.
        Select “Enable hardware flow control”
        Select “Enable modem error control”
        Select “Enable modem compression” – Gamers may wish to disable this as it increases ping times.
    Options tab – Select “Redial if line dropped” 

Power options
Hibernate tab – Check “Enable hibernate support”
Hibernate is useful for quick booting or if you regularly power up and power down your system.

The contents of RAM is stored to a file on the hard drive for quick resumption, so this will only work if you have free space on your C: drive equal to the amount of RAM in your system. 

APM tab – Check “Enable Advanced Power management support”
APM reduces power usage and will automatically power down your system when shut down.
Sounds and Multimedia
Sounds tab – Select “No Sounds” in scheme.
Sounds have to be loaded from the hard drive, thus reducing hard drive performance and occupying CPU cycles.
System

Hardware tab – Select “Device manager”. Expand “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers”
    Select properties for each channel and move to the Advanced Settings tab
        For “Transfer Mode” select “DMA if available”

DMA, Direct Memory Access allows IDE devices to read and write directly to and from RAM, bypassing the CPU. CPU usage is significantly reduced as compared to PIO, Programmed Input Output mode. DMA also has the added advantage of increasing the data transfer rate of the IDE device.
 
Software Settings
Prevent fragmentation and wasted space on C: by doing the following –
Move the Temp folder to drive D:
Go to Control Panel>System>Advanced>Environment Variables>
In User Variables and System Variables, change the location of TMP and TEMP to D:Temp 

Move the Temporary Internet Files to D:TEMP
Go to Control Panel>Internet Options>General. In the Temporary Internet Files section, click on Settings>Move Folder Select D:TEMP and log off as necessary.
Install all programs on D:
Move My Documents to D:

Copy the My Documents folder from C: to D:

Then right click on My Documents on the desktop and Change the target to D:My Documents.
Move the Outlook Express store Folder to D:My Documents
Open Outlook Express. Goto Tools>Options>Maintenance>Store folder
Note the current location. Change the location to D:My DocumentsOutlook Express. 

Copy the contents of the old location to the new location.

This last tweak has the added advantage of a much easier backup when reinstall/crash occurs. You will at least be able to recover all contents of your My Documents folder, which also has your Outlook Express data
 
Registry Tweaks
Memory Management
Browse over to HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management
SecondLevelDataCache – Default is 0. Set to the amount of L2 cache on your processor. Windows 2000 should auto detect this correctly, but it pays to be exact. 

DisablePagingExecutive – Default is 0. This setting determines whether the NT core files are paged to the hard drive. Set to 1 for a slightly speedier Windows 2000. This setting will reduce performance on RAM limited systems. As such a tweak for 128MB+

IoPageLockLimit – Default is 0 (which corresponds to 512 bytes). This setting adjusts the size of data that is read/written to the hard drive. 4096 bytes is a good value to start from (A HEX value of 1000 or decimal 4096). This setting has to be configured for your particular system, so you should benchmark to obtain the optimal size. Setting this too large will reduce performance as the disk will be unable to keep up with the data speeds.

Enable UDMA66. This has to be done through manipulation of a DWORD value. Go to
HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10319}000

Create a new DWORD named EnableUDMA66. Set to 1 to enable. Set to 0 to disable.
Disable CD autorun. This setting will disable autorun on all CDROM/DVDROMs. Go to
HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesCdrom
Set the AutoRun value to 0 to disable autorun. Set to 1 to enable autorun.
 
Text File Editing Tweaks

Increase the number of components available in “Windows Components” in “Add/Remove Programs” in Control Panel. Edit the sysoc.inf file contained in %System root%Inf, usually C:Winntinf. Remove all traces of the word “Hide” from the section labeled “Old Base Components”.