Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Filesystem Tweaks

The guts of the filesystem of both Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 are mostly self-tuning. This is on purpose, following the theory that the filesystem can adjust its own caching and buffering better than you can. Whether this is true or not, there are still some changes you can make to control whether the filesystem does certain things. These changes apply to FAT, NTFS, and NTFS 5 filesystems.

Change Low Disk Space Warning Threshold

Even though you may never have encountered it, Windows NT and 2000 can display an alert warning you that your disk is almost full. The threshold for these alerts is 90% disk usage; while this may seem generous, if you’re using a large disk, a 10% margin results in you seeing these warnings even when the amount of space remaining is large in absolute terms. My local Internet service provider runs an NT news server with more than 80GB of disk storage, so getting a warning that there’s “only” 8GB free is not very useful to them.

The DiskSpaceThreshold value controls when you see this alert; it sets the minimum amount of free space (as a percentage) that triggers a warning. Add this value (it’s a REG_DWORD) to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters; the value you specify should be the percentage of free space, from to 99, which should trigger a warning. When the amount of free space on any volume falls below this value, you get a warning.

Use Longer File Extensions

Even though Win95 ostensibly supports long filenames, ...