Turning off Vista "Nanny" features
- Thread starter Tom|Nbk
- Start date
I've been called to no less than 6 friends of family in the past 3 months, EVERY single one of them had problems that stemmed from Norton Security Suite.
The software is something from bealzebub himself... its bloated, slow, buggy and SO damned intrusive.
Mcafee isnt much better but at least it didnt make a Dual Core Centrino laptop feel like I had gouged 1 of its cores out...
Personally I just have my routers firewall / security well sorted and avoid what i know is likely to give my a virus / spyware.. i find this far less intrusive / expensive than entrusting my computers security to something as terrible as Norton....
To try and keep inline with the OP.
You may (or may not) wish to turn off Vista prefetchers as well. SOme people prefer them, personally I prefer my applications taking half a second longer and my HD not being ground to death whenever im not doing something.
You can turn of "Superprefetch" in the services list or just open Regedit and search for "Prefetcher" then hit F3 after it comes up with the first result. The next result will be in "Memory Management > PrefetchParameters" just set "EnablePrefetcher" and "EnableSuperFetch" to 0.
Same applies to XP but without the superfetch thing. I found disabling it under XP usually halved the start up time (but made common apps load in about 0.5 seconds more time)
Restart after the changes and you might then want to clear out the "prefetch" folder in your windows folder. usually runs to about 100mb.
The software is something from bealzebub himself... its bloated, slow, buggy and SO damned intrusive.
Mcafee isnt much better but at least it didnt make a Dual Core Centrino laptop feel like I had gouged 1 of its cores out...
Personally I just have my routers firewall / security well sorted and avoid what i know is likely to give my a virus / spyware.. i find this far less intrusive / expensive than entrusting my computers security to something as terrible as Norton....
To try and keep inline with the OP.
You may (or may not) wish to turn off Vista prefetchers as well. SOme people prefer them, personally I prefer my applications taking half a second longer and my HD not being ground to death whenever im not doing something.
You can turn of "Superprefetch" in the services list or just open Regedit and search for "Prefetcher" then hit F3 after it comes up with the first result. The next result will be in "Memory Management > PrefetchParameters" just set "EnablePrefetcher" and "EnableSuperFetch" to 0.
Same applies to XP but without the superfetch thing. I found disabling it under XP usually halved the start up time (but made common apps load in about 0.5 seconds more time)
Restart after the changes and you might then want to clear out the "prefetch" folder in your windows folder. usually runs to about 100mb.
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garyh said:Start / All Programs / Administrative Tools ?? / Command Prompt
type services.msc to load service manager scroll to the bottom and disable Windows Indexing by double clicking and pulling the dropdown menu to disable.
Open Windows Defender, Options at the top?? in there somewhere there is a tick box for real time scanning, this is a MASSIVE system hog, watch your system fly once you disable that
Sorry not on Vista atm so just going off the top of my head.
you can start things like that from the run box
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It's called Indexing Service open services.msc, find indexing service, right click properties and under startup type select disable.weringo said:
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Soldato
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Control Panel> Programs and Features> Turn off blah blah blah
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I couldn't find the indexing service so instead I turned off "Windows Search", which has the description of "Provides content indexing and property caching for file, email and other content (via extensibility APIs). The service responds to file and email notifications to index modified content. If the service is stopped or disabled, the Explorer will not be able to display virtual folder views of items, and search in the Explorer will fall back to item-by-item slow search."
Is this the correct service?
Is this the correct service?
There are three ways to turn off Vista’s search indexing:
1. Navigate to Control Panel, Indexing Options. There you can remove all locations or only those you use rarely.
2. It is also possible to disable indexing for a certain drive or enable it only for selected folders. You can do this by changing the Properties of a drive or folder (right click on drive letter in Windows Explorer).
3. The fasted way is to simply disable the Windows Search service. Run Services (just type “Services” at the Start Search bar), right click on the Windows Search service and select “Properties”. Then choose “Disabled” for the start type. Afterwards, you have to stop this service by right clicking on it and selecting “Stop”.
1. Navigate to Control Panel, Indexing Options. There you can remove all locations or only those you use rarely.
2. It is also possible to disable indexing for a certain drive or enable it only for selected folders. You can do this by changing the Properties of a drive or folder (right click on drive letter in Windows Explorer).
3. The fasted way is to simply disable the Windows Search service. Run Services (just type “Services” at the Start Search bar), right click on the Windows Search service and select “Properties”. Then choose “Disabled” for the start type. Afterwards, you have to stop this service by right clicking on it and selecting “Stop”.
Tbh indexing is just something for 1st few boots iirc, the 2nd day of vista usage my hdd is mostly idle standign by, with indexing on.
Defender is annoying though hand killed it off, same for uac, its the worst thing ever invented, total rubbish.
Superfetch disabled, oh cmon your hdd is staying idle from 5 mins after booting, and will never do a thing anymore once the ram is full of cache, superfetch is one of the best things because it causes the pc to actually use it's ram, never before was everything so smooth.
I mean I agree 1st 1 or 2 days my hdd's were trashing itself a bit cos of indexing and superfetch, but 3rd day it was a lot less, and the days after my hdd's are idle 99% of the time, just @ start first few minutes ( 2-5) its loading stuff into ram, but once its properly booted for longer as 5 mins, hdd's are just idling, a lot less usage as in xp ( this may be though do to the fact that xp had mroe apps running though).
Defender is annoying though hand killed it off, same for uac, its the worst thing ever invented, total rubbish.
manic_man said:
Superfetch disabled, oh cmon your hdd is staying idle from 5 mins after booting, and will never do a thing anymore once the ram is full of cache, superfetch is one of the best things because it causes the pc to actually use it's ram, never before was everything so smooth.
I mean I agree 1st 1 or 2 days my hdd's were trashing itself a bit cos of indexing and superfetch, but 3rd day it was a lot less, and the days after my hdd's are idle 99% of the time, just @ start first few minutes ( 2-5) its loading stuff into ram, but once its properly booted for longer as 5 mins, hdd's are just idling, a lot less usage as in xp ( this may be though do to the fact that xp had mroe apps running though).
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Problem I have with superfetch is that while I like the idea in principle, it also goes crazy and starts caching like mad (typically after booting, or when closing an application). If I was running fast defragmented hds then I wouldn't mind so much but it's annoying to have to hear my hd chugging away for ages filling up 2gig of memory.
What he said ^.
Let it do it once, and you'll never again be bothered, while searches will be faster for ever.
As for superfetch, imo it's the best thing about vista, I wouldn't use vista probably if it didn't have it, once again just expressing my opinion and advicing to keep it on, but if you dont like the thing, just disable it, although I'll never understand why someone doesn't want faster windows usage.
Let it do it once, and you'll never again be bothered, while searches will be faster for ever.
As for superfetch, imo it's the best thing about vista, I wouldn't use vista probably if it didn't have it, once again just expressing my opinion and advicing to keep it on, but if you dont like the thing, just disable it, although I'll never understand why someone doesn't want faster windows usage.