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

JonJ678 said:
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?
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I'm mainly an Apple user so I don't know too much about this compared to some people on these forums but I'd say that there are things which can be disabled, deleted or turned off but with todays probable average specs they don't really offer any noticeable benefit. IE. if someone has 4GB of RAM they aren't going to notice whether an MS Service that uses 2MB is running in the background or not. The same for un-needed drivers that ship with Windows. Windows 7 has all of that touch screen stuff iirc which most people here probably won't need but with the size and prices of hard drives nowadaways there's really no need to go to the effort of tinkering.

That's just my two pence. :)
 
You could remove the drivers as you said, but if they are just sitting on your HDD, removing them will not show any performance increase.
(unless running out of space ofc)

I disable the odd service Ill never use like media sharing etc. But generally movmg page/scratch files etc is all you need to do to gain <wee amount> of performance.

You can disable a whole load of services, then reenable some when X doesn't work anymore for an unoticable increase in performance.
The stuff mentioned above can help in certain aspects but in terms of more FPS in games etc, not really much worth it. :)
 
Static pagefile (2048MB), disable prefetch, page defrag, disk defrag.

Or just install the OS to an SSD :p

Job done!
 
WIN 7 -

SSD tweak utility.

Perfectdisk 10 -to look after my 500GB partitioned harddrive, works atreat.

CCleaner along with Free Internet Erasor(very good).
 
i used to fool around with stuff, but all i can say is get a SSD for the os and it will radially change your os experience from boot times to installs, the performance is very noticeable. makes doing all the other tweaks a waist of time TBH.

all i do is keep my startup items in order, as itunes and crap will always readd themselves and so on..
 
Why bother with a third-party defrag? In both Vista and 7 Windows does a fantastic job of keeping your HDDs tidy.

Using Windows 7 for about a year now I have done very, very few manual defrags. I have never seen my drives more then a few % fragmented and only after a lot of data transfer and copying etc.
 
Performance Options > Visual Effects > Adjust for best performance.

Bit of poking around in msconfig.

Disable automatic updates and everything else in Security Center.

I notice a slight improvement using Readyboost on my laptop.

Beyond that just using the most lightweight apps I can find, that and I try to avoid having stuff running in the background that I don't need (Virus scanners, firewalls, itunes, etc).
 
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