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Windows performance tips in one spot
seedling:
Hey all,
I realise that most, if not all, of us know about the tips posted on this site:
http://9tutorials.com/2007/10/09/make-your-windows-xp-run-faster-than-never-before.html
But it sure is nice to revisit some of these tweaks when things start acting strange. As always proceed with caution and know what you're doing before you undertake any of the advise on the above page (especially with regards to shutting down services).
Lashiec:
Ugh... some of them actually do something, some others... well... I know certain someone who is going to get crazy about those, and one in particular ;D
Ralf Maximus:
Tip #1: Buy a faster computer.
That's what it always boils down to, right? And the one you want ALWAYS costs $3000.
f0dder:
Ugh... some of them actually do something, some others... well... I know certain someone who is going to get crazy about those, and one in particular ;D
-Lashiec (October 17, 2007, 07:58 PM)
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* f0dder waves :P
EDIT: here's the list ;)
"DISABLE INDEXING SERVICES" - good idea if you don't need it. Mainly to avoid the harddrive access, though.
"OPTIMISE DISPLAY SETTINGS" - not something that gains you a lot on even rather dated hardware, it's more of a subjective preference thing.
"DISABLE PERFORMANCE COUNTERS" - yeah sure, if you want programs randomly breaking, without really gaining anything.
"SPEEDUP FOLDER BROWSING" - I do this, it can indeed help a bit when browsing network shares... especially if there's a lot of computers in your workgroup.
"IMPROVE MEMORY USAGE" - mjah. You used to be able to get a lot of performance by tweaking the cache settings on Win9x, but I dunno about NT. "LargeSystemCache" if you have the RAM and aren't using ATI video drivers, but those "free up RAM" apps are snake oil.
"OPTIMISE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION" - never been able to feel performance increase by this, but perhaps it works on dialup connections?
"OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE" - everybody has an opinion on this, and most people are wrong :). Simply monitor your pagefile usage doing the work you usually do, and see how often it's actually used. Set a somewhat-higher minimum limit (to avoid fragmentation), and don't set a max settting (to avoid running out of paging space). Or get enough RAM and disable the pagefile completely.
"RUN BOOTVIS - IMPROVE BOOT TIMES" - never played with it myself, but Microsoft claims it's only really meant as a tracing tool, and that XP does optimization itself.
"REMOVE THE DESKTOP PICTURE" - heh.
"REMOVE FONTS FOR SPEED" - true, don't keep a gazillion fonts installed that you don't need - add/remove additional fonts as needed.
"DISABLE UNNECESSARY SERVICES" - good advice, but be careful what you disable... not sure everything on his list is a good idea for everybody.
"TURN OFF SYSTEM RESTORE" - dunno if this is good advice for regular people. I personally don't use system restore, I tend to do reinstalls instead. But it's been a nice thing when fixing other people's computers.
"DEFRAGMENT YOUR PAGEFILE" - no, don't defragment it, make sure it never gets fragmented... it's all about setting a high minimum size. Heck, even with yesterdays harddrives, how much is 2 gigabytes?
"SPEEDUP FOLDER ACCESS - DISABLE LAST ACCESS UPDATE" - indeed. Especially if you often search through your entire drive, not using an indexed searcher, this is noticable. And how many people need "last-accessed" timestamp? (This doesn't turn off last-modified, which is useful).
"DISABLE SYSTEM SOUNDS" - heh.
"IMPROVE BOOT TIMES" - *shrug*. As far as I've been tell, most boottime is spent in device initialization, rather than disk I/O. Moving from a slow disk to a 10k rpm raptor drive did speed up booting a bit, but not very much (application loading times are another matter, though :)).
"IMPROVE SWAPFILE PERFORMANCE" - sure, if you're running Win9x. This has no effect on NT.
"MAKE YOUR MENUS LOAD FASTER" - heh.
"MAKE PROGRAMS LOAD FASTER" - /prefetch:1? Heh.
"IMPROVE XP SHUTDOWN SPEED" - bad idea blindly applying this advice... some applications take a bit of time to shut down, yeah... and some of those applications are actually doing useful stuff, like flushing data to disk, whatever. Sounds like a goooood idea to kill those off after very short timeouts?
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES I" - eh, "checking temp and history folders" on startup? Never seen windows do that. And the tip uses hardcoded folders, which is bad - if you really want to do this, use "%HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\History", %TEMP% and %TMP%.
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES II" - doesn't save you much time, but sure.
"SPEED UP BOOT TIMES III" - bad advice to give generically, I can imagine the horror if end-users start doing this on corporate networks (not that people should have admin privileges on corporate networks, but...). And it's not like DHCP takes much time unless you're on a really badly configured network.
"FREE UP MEMORY" - no, no, no and NO! Snake oil, and can actually degrade performance.
"ENSURE XP IS USING DMA MODE" - yep. Sometimes XP reverts to PIO mode though, which indicates either that a drive is dying, or that you've been using very scratched optical media. Google for "xp reverts to pio". Iirc 2k defaulted to PIO mode for optical drives, btw.
"ADD CORRECT NETWORK CARD SETTINGS" - the 'advanced' tab has device-specific settings. My device doesn't have a "connection type" setting, go figure. Some NICs have settings that it makes sense to tweak, others don't.
"REMOVE ANNOYING DELETE CONFIRMATION MESSAGES" - not good advice for end-users, and not a speedup.
"DISABLE PREFETCH ON LOW MEMORY SYSTEMS" - buy more memory, it's cheap :)
Ralf Maximus:
"OPTIMISE YOUR PAGEFILE" - everybody has an opinion on this, and most people are wrong smiley. Simply monitor your pagefile usage doing the work you usually do, and see how often it's actually used. Set a somewhat-higher minimum limit (to avoid fragmentation), and don't set a max settting (to avoid running out of paging space).
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One thing that made a beeg difference for me: allowing Windows to create multiple page files on separate harddrives. It's tempting to pick your fastest drive and use that (disabling all others) but after I let Windows handle it I ended up with four pagefiles and less thrashing.
Or get enough RAM and disable the pagefile completely.
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No matter how much RAM you have, some (older?) software malfunctions if there is no pagefile, generating messages like "low on virtual memory". Do this with one with caution.
Moving from a slow disk to a 10k rpm raptor drive did speed up booting a bit, but not very much (application loading times are another matter, though smiley).
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Fun fact: A slower drive can actually EXCEED the seek performance of a 10K drive if it is partitioned properly. The idea is that by creating a small partition the maximum seek distance the drive's head must move is reduced, resulting in smaller random seek times. Google "half stroking" or "quarter stroking" for relevant articles on the technique.
Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a 10K Raptor, half-stroking will boost its performance, keeping the lead. :-) Better yet, RAID a pair of 10K's together and half-stroke the array. (Really! This works; I've done it.)
Gosh, that sounds pornographic.
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