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This was a problem even for systems with more RAM, because that background bitmap was always a tempting target for the memory manager looking to page out long idle memory. It was exacerbated by the aggressive disk cache, which could cause even programs that didn't allocate much memory directly to swap out the background by doing enough regular buffered I/O.

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Huge performance increase I still do (probably with negligible effects) was to manually set the disk cache (or whatever it's called - ram using HDD) to a set amount (usually double the ram). Letting windows manage it meant it was constantly changing in size and moving around the drive and with spinning disks killed performance. Also made defragging often mkre necessary. And of course disabling system restore.

I still do it out of habit with SSDs and I imagine it's mostly unnecessary but never ran into issues. I figure at worst it may increase the life of the SSD

Add that before UDMA modes any disk I/O burned CPU cycles as well. A single core CPU spent most of the time reading from a slow disk. Good times!

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