Share your Windows 7 tweaks

Danfoss2011 said:
I

MSCONFIG :- Boot timeout change it to 3 from 30 (3 is the lowest it'll go too).
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Why? If you aren't at the Pc when the menu shows you aren't exactly losing any time anyway and if you are you can simply make the choice straight away.

only thing I've changed was preventing my HDDs ever being allowed to power save, everything else is at defaults.
 
Halfmad said:
Why? If you aren't at the Pc when the menu shows you aren't exactly losing any time anyway and if you are you can simply make the choice straight away.

only thing I've changed was preventing my HDDs ever being allowed to power save, everything else is at defaults.
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Time your BIOS boot and tell me how long you have to wait! This makes it so much quicker from BIOS loading to oh finaly my OS is loading. This is way before the Welcome screen or anything, it's the build up to the windows apearing.

On my laptop it's made things a bit more quicked to load up, good if you pick the thing up and down a lot
 
Not all BIOS boot sequences are the same. it all depends on what is connected and what BIOS it is.

My AMI Sandybridge BIOS is so fast I cannot see what the POST screen says and in the next second it's loading Windows.
 
Danfoss2011 said:
Time your BIOS boot and tell me how long you have to wait! This makes it so much quicker from BIOS loading to oh finaly my OS is loading. This is way before the Welcome screen or anything, it's the build up to the windows apearing.

On my laptop it's made things a bit more quicked to load up, good if you pick the thing up and down a lot
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You only see the boot timeout countdown if you have multiple Microsoft OS's installed, and on the Safemode boot screen

The countdown will start from 3 instead of 30

So in normal use, this makes no difference at all



One thing that I do is leave homegroup and disable both services for it, only so it stops the logo appearing in explorer, not as a 'speed boost'
 
I find the start menu becomes quite slow to use if indexing is disabled, it also causes all the desktop icons to load slower with it turned off. I think the default settings for it only make it index parts of the documents and settings folder as well as some windows folders, it doesn't just index everything on the computer by default.
 
My 'booting bottleneck' is the AHCI BIOS detecting my drives. My ASUS board is slooow, but my Gigabyte board is fast. There hasn't been a BIOS update to address that, don't think there ever will, kind of negates the SSD when booting.
 
Getting the search to work would be nice. I've moved the Documents folder to another drive, indexed it and it will not find anything.

And every folder having an individual view setting would be nice.
 
joey1211 said:
Getting the search to work would be nice. I've moved the Documents folder to another drive, indexed it and it will not find anything.

And every folder having an individual view setting would be nice.
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These do work, for me anyway and my Docs ifs on another drive.

Don't use the Libraries link if you want individual view settings. Library ignore this.
 
joey1211 said:
Getting the search to work would be nice. I've moved the Documents folder to another drive, indexed it and it will not find anything.

And every folder having an individual view setting would be nice.
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Try going into the Indexing optoins in control panel, ticking the new folders (untick useless ones) and then click 'rebuild index'
 
All security options set to their most paranoid, all services and startup items I don't need disabled (doesn't make a lot of difference on my rig, but shaved 2 seconds off boot on my friends netbook), edited PATH and massive virtual memory to deal with Mass Effect's memory leaks.
 
stopper said:
Actually it's a fact. Learn how indexing works before shouting "Utter BS"
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Can you post a source for this please?

Because when I search on Google all that comes up is your post ;)

To the OP the only thing I change is the power options to stop my HDD's powering down.
 
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stopper said:
Actually it's a fact. Learn how indexing works before shouting "Utter BS"
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Quote sources then. With evidence to support indexing slows down an OS installation over time. My experience with Windows 7 over two years [inc BETA and RC] tells me you're wrong. My BETA install never slowed down. My RC install never slowed down. The 4 Windows 7 installs I have had since launch haven't slowed down. Dozens of client machines haven't slowed down.

Guess what, they all use indexing.
 
stopper said:
Actually it's a fact. Learn how indexing works before shouting "Utter BS"
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Proof please, there's a lot of myths in the internet ether about Windows OS's and how they work, usually introduced by people on forums trying to look clever rather than trying to provide accurate advice. Evidence would be helpful - I'll happily turn off indexing if you can provide reputable sources for your advice stopper. :)
 
Danfoss2011 said:
Time your BIOS boot and tell me how long you have to wait! This makes it so much quicker from BIOS loading to oh finaly my OS is loading. This is way before the Welcome screen or anything, it's the build up to the windows apearing.

On my laptop it's made things a bit more quicked to load up, good if you pick the thing up and down a lot
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I don't think you realise what boot timeout does, I mean it should be fairly obvious you're wrong, since before you changed that setting your computer didn't just afk for 30 seconds before deciding it could be bothered to load windows.

The only thing I do to win 7 is disable firewall/uac etc as I don't really need them and dislike the inconvenience, as most others have said, win 7 doesnt need tweaks like XP did.
 
To save space on my SSD I disabled hibernate and reduced the page file to 400MB minimum, 2GB maximum.

With 8GB RAM this saves me about 14GB of space on my SSD I think (8GB from disabling hibernation, 6-7.6GB from smaller pagefile).
 
stopper said:
Actually it's a fact. Learn how indexing works before shouting "Utter BS"
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I don't know how indexing is implemented on Windows 7 specifically, but I do know the general concept and how it works on several databases, and I see no reason to why it would slow the system down unless it's a really poor implementation.
 
Tweaking the amount of space system restore uses is a good one, as is disabling all the remote registry cr*p

I also have a bunch of registry tweaks I run just to get vista how I like it as well as run through my standard services.msc cleanup.
 
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