In what ways do you attempt to improve windows' performance?

JonJ678

JonJ678

JonJ678

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It's a terribly vague question I know. The reasoning is that a fair few of us spend considerable amounts of time tweaking the hardware windows is running on, so it stands to reason that some of us try to make windows faster as well.

I spent a great deal of time playing with nlite, and eventually come to the conclusion that while it does seem to make things faster, the OS that results seems to break rather more often than before. I no longer use it.

I also spent some time trying to make use of ramdisks, though this was ultimately unsuccessful as well. Primarily because I forgot to move data out of the ramdisk before rebooting.

So, I'm now running a vanilla copy of vista, and wondering if I'm missing out. I'd be interested to hear if any of you are still customising the operating system.

Cheers

edit: If you do nothing at all; why not?
 
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Windows 7 wise the only thing I've done that's I've actually noticed made a difference is using a decent quality 16Gb pen drive entirely for Readyboost. Actually notice speed improvement and reponsiveness in Windows now.

Nothing else has actually worked though!
 
Halfmad said:
Windows 7 wise the only thing I've done that's I've actually noticed made a difference is using a decent quality 16Gb pen drive entirely for Readyboost. Actually notice speed improvement and reponsiveness in Windows now.

Nothing else has actually worked though!
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Interesting - mind naming the pen drive you use? I guess most people on this board were used to tweaking XP this way and that, switched to Win 7 with new hardware and hadn't really noticed any performance issues except the main hdd :rolleyes:
 
On windows 7:
8GB USB (ntfs) readyboost - sandisk ultra
shifted pagefile to second drive in own partition
defrag several times during install to optimise installs etc
Added in mystic thumbs (for photoshop thumbs) and foxit pdf Ifilter for better explorer and search.
Adjusted reg for pdf previews in explorer
Adjusted reg to make start bar more efficient (single tabs but smaller buttons) and reduced time for previews to pop up.
Moved user data to separate drive to OS.
Used MS security essentials for av etc - seems best performance on x64

Added a few apps to help with things like remote storage (gladinet links to ms skydrive account) and monitoring of system stats (everest) along with some sidebar widgets.
 
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In Windows 7 most of the "tweaks" are really down to making your life a bit easier rather than any fundamental improvements to the OS.

For example, the Search bar in the Start Menu [also in Vista] saves a whole bunch of time. If I need something and I don't already have a shortcut, I just Windows Key then type what I want and hit enter. Not even a tweak, but learning to use it can make Windows seem so much faster.

I am interested in your thumbnail and pdf tweaks, lsg1r. Care to give more detail?
 
I customise a lot with XP, mostly because I play ArmA 2 and its vastly unoptimised and I can't afford new Hardware to run it, so every little tweak helps :p
 
SiriusB said:
I am interested in your thumbnail and pdf tweaks, lsg1r. Care to give more detail?
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I'm using windows 7 x64 pro.

Mystic thumbs - install for photoshop thumbnails and previews in explorer/picture viewer etc - been using it for ages now

pdf reg hack - works with acrobat pro (cs3 and cs4 tested on my rigs), gives previews in explorer and outlook etc kind of like in os-x. Acrobat reader should work normally. Theres a foxit alternative but it doesn't work with win7

Foxit pdf Ifilter - allows windows to search text in pdf's, it's faster and less buggy than adobe's verison

In case of others
Faster previews on start menu
 
lsg1r said:
I'm using windows 7 x64 pro.

Mystic thumbs - install for photoshop thumbnails and previews in explorer/picture viewer etc - been using it for ages now

pdf reg hack - works with acrobat pro (cs3 and cs4 tested on my rigs), gives previews in explorer and outlook etc kind of like in os-x. Acrobat reader should work normally. Theres a foxit alternative but it doesn't work with win7

Foxit pdf Ifilter - allows windows to search text in pdf's, it's faster and less buggy than adobe's verison

In case of others
Faster previews on start menu
Click to expand...



nice, nice :)
 
I knew about the faster preview already, and ty for the other details. Might give the PDF Ifilter a go, been working with PDFs more often recently.

simulatorman said:
Just Windows 7 installed on a SSD.
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Just built my new rig today with an Intel SSD. It's unbelievable! :eek:

It is going to suck using any other computer now! :p
 
SiriusB said:
Just built my new rig today with an Intel SSD. It's unbelievable! :eek:

It is going to suck using any other computer now! :p
Click to expand...

That's why I haven't bought one yet, have a feeling every PC at work etc will feel stupidly slow, made worse by Mcafee EPO AV too :p It'd be unbearable!
 
I admit I'm disappointed. Some good ideas from lsg1r, but otherwise it seems no one bothers. I shall alter the question.

In what ways do you attempt to improve windows' performance, and if you do nothing at all, why not?

Is it because windows is considered to be perfect already, because it's too difficult to improve upon, or just that software tweaking is dull?

Hush Rainmaker, if we don't keep linux out of this the thread is apt to derail itself.
 
?

The reason you've had little response directly answering your question is because Wi7 doesn't need "tweaking" to improve its performance.
 
JonJ678 said:
I admit I'm disappointed. Some good ideas from lsg1r, but otherwise it seems no one bothers. I shall alter the question.

In what ways do you attempt to improve windows' performance, and if you do nothing at all, why not?

Is it because windows is considered to be perfect already, because it's too difficult to improve upon, or just that software tweaking is dull?

Hush Rainmaker, if we don't keep linux out of this the thread is apt to derail itself.
Click to expand...

I've rarely seen performance tweaking for windows make a real and noticable improvement, the only one was a quick shutdown tweak for XP which I believe was implemented in SP2 or 3 anyway.

Windows 7 is fine, genuinely don't think I could wring any more performance out of it that would justify the time spent trying to improve it.
 
In my experience if you've got an uncluttered hard drive and a decent CPU/RAM then you don't really need to tweak anything in Vista or Windows 7. The only thing worth doing is using something like CCleaner every few days to keeps things neat and tidy.
 
Is the conclusion then that windows 7 is as good as it's possible to get, with the exception of moving the paging file and user data to different hard drives to the OS?

Since windows supports an enormous variety of hardware out of the box, and is set up to do countless things which any given home user is not interested in, it seems implausible that it is not possible to change anything for the better. For example, vista came with an enormous quantity of drivers which do nothing other than eat hard drive space if you don't have the hardware they support, so it is reasonable to remove said drivers.

Is there nothing which by default will sit in ram doing nothing of any use, or processes which use cpu time but offer no benefit? Nothing which causes writes to hard drives which are not required?

I'm sure you're not all implying that windows 7 is infallible, [thread=18114550]this[/thread] thread at least suggests some things are worth doing to it. Neither do I wish to give the impression that I am thread trashing here, I am genuinely surprised by the idea that there is nothing that can be configured to improve the system for different usage patterns. The attitude that "it's good enough at stock" is reasonable, but unexpected.
 
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