Stripping down Win7 for a low spec machine.

MikeHunt79 · 20 Mar 2010 at 22:06

I'm finally getting to grips with Win7, some things seem a little to XP but I think I've figured out most of it.

Anyway, I'm running Win7 on my netbook instead of XP now, and while it's nicer in many ways, it's not quite as fast as my slimmed down XP install which had some services disabled also.

Is there a guide or list of things I can do to improve the speed of Win7 on a low spec machine? So far all I've done is disable system restore, but there must be some tweaks I can do in order to improve performance?

I don't really use my netbook for much apart from browsing the web and the odd game, so I'm not worried if I cannot run Adobe Premiere on it for example...

JonJ678 · 21 Mar 2010 at 01:18

Google seems to think vlite will work on 7. I haven't tried this myself, though I love nlite to pieces.

Do you know what the bottleneck is, i.e. hard drive, running out of ram, other? It may be easier to swap hardware around than to strip down 7 without accidentally breaking parts of it.

asim18 · 21 Mar 2010 at 01:34

Vlite does work on win7. I've tried it myself and it does make it slightly faster. It also considerably reduces memory usage, which would be good for a netbook.

You may want to turn off search indexing as well.

marmalade · 21 Mar 2010 at 11:02

I run my Asus 1005Pe with 2gb ram no probs. There are stripped down versions at around 1Gb but whats the point -games don't belong on a nettie and for everything else its excellent-Writing/ Telephone. I am using the Starter but perhaps I will try the 64bit Prof as the n450 chip allows this

sare^baw's · 21 Mar 2010 at 15:09

i used the blackviper website to tweak win7 on my daughters pc, made a big difference, reduced the ram usage by 200mb which is a lot on a pc with 1g or ram. Im going to do my pc next.

SiriusB · 21 Mar 2010 at 15:46

The usual disabling of services and so on will usually help. A lot of what you could disable in XP you can also disable in Windows 7. You're only a few clicks away from turning it back on if something doesn't behave as expected.

There will be plenty of tweaking guides out there, just be aware a lot of tweaks don't really do anything that would make any noticeable difference.