In the "Optimizing Windows XP and 2000 for Audio" post, you are encouraged to use a separate machine for music production, one not used for any other applications, not even to connect to the Internet. It also tells you to disable seemingly-trivial features, such as screen savers, wallpaper, and power-saving options, and others not so trivial, like antivirus and firewalls. I don't have the luxury of that dedicated machine. If you don't either, here's a trick I use.

Windows has a feature called "User Profiles" which lets different users set up their Desktop and applications to look and run according to their preferences. Instead of setting up the machine for different individuals, I use this to set it up for different functions: Internet, music production, graphics, or whatever. This way my music-production profile comes up optimized as per my previous post; the Internet profile comes up "armored", with appropriate security apps that I don't want running while making music; a graphics profile will have all possible colors, bit depth and other visual goodies; and so on. You get the idea. If you just have the one machine, learn to use this feature.

Note: In XP you must disable the fast user switching feature, i.e., force each user to log out completely, for this to work; otherwise a user's profile remains active and all the programs and features left running remain in memory, which is then unavailable for what you REALLY want to do, i.e., make bootiful moosic.

For your delectation and edification,
R.

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."