Question: I recently re-installed my system and upgraded to the immense amount of 256 mb ram.
Now, I've been optimizing my pc to go as fast as possible, and I read at several places that if I went to "this computer/properties/file system" or some such, I could set pc function to server and it would run slightly faster.
However, when I try this, it seems to only slow down slightly.
So, my question is, what does the function do exactly? I read something about hidden caches, but I'm not really convinced.

And another question, any other generic ideas to speed up a win ME system?
DMA is enabled, sys restore is off, no spyware, latency times of all components are at their optimum, latest drivers are installed, apart from the latest nvidia drivers, since my n64 emulator (pj64) somehow wrecks it beyond repair(hence the recent reinstall)
System specs:
p3 1Ghz
Intel VC820 motherboard
256 Mb RDRam (yep, Rambus stuff)
20 gb harddrive (Samsung SV2044)
generic 12 speed dvd player(manufacturer remains a mystery, but it works)
ASUS cd burner 52/32/52x
Sweex 10/100 network card
Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 TI 64 mb
floppy drive
Win ME (dutch version) with all essential updates, media player 9 and Directx 9c

What? You got nothing better to do than trying to tweak your old system for a little faster performance. (Must be some long cold nights there!)

The performance of your system in response to most of these tweaks is minor and depends on exactly what you are doing with your system. You have just done the biggest tweak for performance that you can do. Getting Windows ME to the 256MB RAM level is the most cost effective addition/change you can make.

Your next chain around your system is your slow Samsung SV2044 disk drive. It is a 5200rpm slug, that can not really do the UDMA 66 that it claims to or that your system board can support. While very reliable, it is very slow for a disk drive in its size range. Getting a new faster disk drive would help, but then it would be limited by the old system board's UDMA-66 limit. Just make sure you have the last system board drivers from Intel installed as they might help a little. Running DEFRAG on the drive might help overall performance a little.

Now back to your question. The "server" setting sets the amount of memory (RAM) that is used as as a cache for the read-ahead of the disk drive. The assumption is that when a program is reading a data file, the next records read from the file will be the next sequential records. So this setting sets how much ahead the windows file system will try to read "ahead" of the program for all the files it has open. When processing data files or acting as a network server sending program files to a networked system, this can really speed things up. But if you are just cruising the Internet, it does not make much difference (I have my Registry patched to provide a BIG Cache option that gives me a much bigger read ahead cache as I run several programs where it makes a big difference.) For you, it may just be slowing you down a little (it still tries to do the read ahead even if it is not useful to you).

There are some standard Windows ME modules that you can remove from your Startup list that might help a little (See: page), and a few things to check for that might be slowing down your system. If you never use System Restore, you can disable it.

thanks for the reply!
Unfortunately, I'm tweaking it due to lack of money for a newer one.
So far, I've been recently succesful, since it runs much faster than my girlfriend's pc, which is a p4 2ghz with 512 meg ram.

could games be classified under those programs that benefit from the server cache?

Have a look at the homepage link on this response for a long list of tweaks.