How big is your windows folder?

By NeoMayhem
in Microsoft (Windows)

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  • 5 months later...
Neowinian

Evil Prince

Posted
Posted

I know this is a dusty old post but your Windows folder size is almost entirely irrelevant. Having a 400MB or a 3GB Windows folder will do little if anything to contribute to overall performance. Yes, having 30 items in your Startup folder and another 25 in your HKLM\SW\MS\Win\Current Version\Run will hamper performance (99% of all these items are 100% unnecessary aside from poorly-written but "necessary" drivers). Other biggest killers are unneeded services that startup automatically.

The NTFS file system provides performance over a long curve, from recently-installed OS to bloated C: drive full of whatchoohave. Any FAT flavor gets antsier and trudgier as the drive gets fuller.

The "best" way to streamline a system and get it to perform is to:

-Kill all unnecessary (not to you, to functionality) Startup Items

-Kill all unnecessary (not to you, to functionality) Autostarting Services

-Kill all temp -including browser cache - files, not necessary log files. *

* Log files that are rebuilt or are dynamic in nature are going to reappear no matter what you do. Sometimes, some log files get hefty but in order to not have them get too fat for your taste, logging has to be disabled for that feature/application/whatever.

"Streamline" your registry. **

**After using a computer for a couple years, any user accumulates untold registry updates, e.g. application versions, MS updates, etc. You can see scads of "Cur Ver" keys that simply point to other hives and keys. These are redundant and swell the registry database. Nevertheless it isn't too wise to edit these, because sometimes these pointers are multifaceted and their references thread to multiple endpoints (classes, etc.) Some of them are monofaceted and can be edited to point directly to the newest incarnation, but there could be hundreds of these.

The five biggest subversive culprits of performance hits, IMHO, are:

-Regsitry entries that never go away even after uninstallation

(RealPlayer and Norton anything are two notorious violators here)

-Undue registry entries.

(Ditto RealPlayer and Norton)

-Recurrent installation and reinstallation of the same programs/drivers.

(This rarely ever fixes a broken app or driver from the registry angle)

-Undue Services installed by Apps (Norton, McAfee, the usual suspects)

-DLL versions that don't play nice with other DLLs even though they're "updates"

The plague of Windows since V3.0

A side note on the above: sometimes new hardware doesn't really play nice with all other hardware. IOW, even if it installs correctly and seems to work properly, sometimes default settings are very conservative OR some goodies, no matter how good, just don't rise to their full potential when they're in the company of other stuff. Mating computer hardware upgrades is a lifelong education.

Defragging your hard disk helps, mostly so after deleting unnecessary/redundant/duplicate garbage, but it's not a panacea.

If you're concerned about space (and almost all PC users SHOULDN'T be), put all your data on a separate hard disk. (Note: a second partition is NOT the same; it's the same physical disk). Get a big enough data drive to do an occasional C: drive backup onto.

The biggest performance increase can be to do all the above AND use SCSI drives, especially 10K- or 15KRPM drives. SCSI drives outperform even the fastest SATA drives for at least two reasons:

-A SCSI controller only makes small and infrequent requests to the CPU for reads or writes. SATA is little better than the CPU hog that ATAPI has been.

-SCSI drives can perform SIMULTANEOUS reads and writes. SATA and ATAPI don't.

Other than the above, in my humble experience (and I learn a bit more every day), there's little more to do to increase or even maintain performance over time.

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