The performance gains may all be in my head, but it does seem to help in performance, however marginal that may be. Others, however, prefer to buy third-party products to solve their registry woes. And in all cases, perform a backup beforehand. Windows 2000 has several built-in tools for monitoring and controlling system performance. Of these, Task Manager, which also came with NT 4.0, continues to be popular with system managers.
Applications is probably the simplest.
It lets you know which applications are currently running and provides an easy way to kill any of them. The performance tab is a great tool as it shows graphs of memory and CPU usage. By playing around with it for a short while, it becomes easy to see which programs are hogging RAM or processor power. Finally, there is the processes tab that shows each of the processes running and how much memory and CPU time each consumes. In a development environment, it's an invaluable first place to look for rogue processes and large-scale memory leaks.