Disable Performance Counters Running in Background

There is a performance monitor located in XP in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance that does not usually see the light of day with most users.

What it does is track a number of different areas regarding your system’s performance, such as CPU activity and hard drive access.

It runs constantly in the background using up system resources without most people even using it. If you have no use for this and wish to reclaim some system resources, there is a tweak to turn it off.
First, you will need to download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List Utility from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7ff99683-b7ec-4da6-92ab-793193604ba4&displaylang=en

Install it, then go to C:\Program Files\Resource Kit and run the Exctrlst.exe utility.

Select each line in the “Extensible performance counters” window and clear the “performance counters enabled” button below. This must be done for each counter. When it’s finished, just exit the utility.

The next time you access the performance monitor, there will be no information available or shown.