Here's the tweak that drove me to re-write this tweak guide. It can improve operating system and application speed by up to 10% by aligning your files for Windows to make them run faster (the computer dynamically aligns all files loaded into memory anyway, so doing it beforehand saves CPU time) - so listen up. Windows has a little program that is included with it called walign.exe. Originally this guide included step-by-step instructions on a variety of ways to use this program, but since then several things have come to my attention. The first of these things is that if you don't have Office 95/98 installed (that I missed because I have the full version of Office installed), the program will not work properly for you. There is, however, a registry trick that will fix this problem for you. So why did I remove the step-by-step instructions? Because there is an even easier way to align your files. Windows Magazine has written a little batch file and registry patch package that works wonders. It even includes an undo option of the optimization fails. Here's how it works:

- Download WMAlign.zip and extract the package to it's own directory.
- Merge the registry patch to your own registry unless you have a FULL copy of Office 95/98 (not Small Business Edition or stand-alone Word/Excel). Office 2000 includes it's own optimization program, so if you are using that, you will need to install the patch as well.
- Move the batch file to the directory you wish to optimize.
- Open a DOS window and go to the directory you wish to align and type in wmalign *.dll *.exe.
- Check the WMAlign.txt file to see which files didn't align properly and restore those from the UNALIGN directory. Also keep this directory in case you ever need to patch the program because the aligned files are not patchable.
- Defragment your disk to optimize the newly written files.

Cool, huh? Special thanks to "Random Kaos" for this information. If you want to take a look at the original Windows Magazine article, you can check it out here.

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