Disable Monitoring tools

All versions of Windows NT (NT 4.0, win2k, XP , Vista & Vienna) contain numerous counters that gather performance information from various parts of the system. The data is continually written to the registry and retrieved by performance monitoring tools, such as System Monitor. The issue with this process is that if you are not using any monitoring tools then the data is being written to the registry for no good reason, however this is balanced by the operating system maintaining a registry cache in memory.

If you do not use a performance monitoring tool or any third-party desktop gadgets that report performance data then you can disable all performance data gathering.

WARNING
If you perform this tweak then the data from all performance objects and counters will not appear in any performance tool. You will not be able to use System Monitor or any other tool that uses Performance Library (perflib) data. Performance will merely be reported as 0 or 100, depending on the counter.

To disable all performance counters, run regedit and navigate to this registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib

Add a new DWORD Value named DisablePerformanceCounters:

Set the value of DisablePerformanceCounters to 1 and either reboot or restart the registry service: