In order to see if your system is any faster, you need to measure the performance of the system before and after you try your tuning changes. There's a variety of applications for testing your hard drive, CPU, memory, and overall system performance. This allows you to also test a proposed configuration versus the existing configuration.
In all cases of testing, you should have a relatively quiet system, meaning that there is a minimum of applications running. For true testing, you should reboot the machine between each test, and run each test at least 5 times, then take the average. Rebooting clears any in-memory caches that can affect the tuning numbers, and also makes sure there is a larger amount of system RAM free.