features you disabled in Vista?

By Hani
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Grand Master

+Gary7 Subscriber²

Posted
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Yes. System restore is useless - until the first time you need it - and then it's invaluable. Unless you have a third party backup or imaging utility (such as True Image or Ghost) you should leave System Restore enabled. And even if you do have one of those utilities, there's no advantage to disabling System Restore except for disk space. And of course there's a huge pinned thread on UAC and why it makes no sense to disable it - it should just be set to silent mode if the pop-up warnings bother you. And then there's Superfetch - why exactly would someone disable that?

Oh well, to each his own ;)

System Restore has saved me a bunch of times. I would never disable it. It is better than SR was in Xp.

Grand Master

Brian M. Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

User Account Control

System Protection (drives are imaged, data stored seperately)

Superfetch

Windows Search

Sidebar

Security Center

Windows Modules Installer (I enable it whenever I need it, it stops TrustedInstaller barraging my CPU (and battery life)).

As for superfetch, battery life for me is more important than applications starting 2 seconds faster, and the constant hard drive thrashing that superfetch causes has a severe negative impact on battery life.

Grand Master

ViperAFK

Posted
Posted (edited)
Because it slows down a lot of games and similar applications. It also sits there and crunches at your harddrives for no apparent reasons. The day I turned off, my performance increased for everything *but* the initial loading of programs. But a **** lot of good that does; I'd rather wait an extra second or two for the application to load and then have it run smoothly and effortlessly for the entirity of the session.

Your experiences may vary. Disabling Superfetch definitely speeds things up on my end for the applications I use the most.

Superfetch does NOT slow down games. I have tried superfetch on and off and games and intensive apps that need tons of memory perform the same and apps launch faster. When an application needs memory the cache is instantly purged which is no slower than allocating free memory.

Superfetch also does NOT cause hard drive thrashing, if you have constant drive thrashing it is something else, not superfetch. For me and I have 4 gb of ram superfetch only takes a minute of two to load everything into ram which is hardly "constant thrashing"

I have only disabled the sidebar and put UAC into silent mode on my desktop and laptop. Completely turning off UAC is pointless when you can use silent mode.

Edited by ViperAFK
Veteran

xpgeek

Posted
Posted

I turn off Windows Defender and disable its service, Avast already does active scanning for spyware too, don't need two 2 programs doing the same thing.

Windows Search, cause I don't really do much file system searching at all, and when I do I'm fine with the extra ten seconds or so to do it.

Sidebar, cause its just useless to me and never found any gadgets that I reallyyy needed.

System restore, cause its just a waste of drive space and I keep very good backups on my own.

Readyboost service disabled, cause I just neverr use it.

Windows Firewall, I use Comodo.

Security Center, cause its just useless to me. I know the status of my security.

Uh, thats bout it. I've grown to prefer UAC on. I am curious bout SuperFetch now tho, never even tried turning it off. People really seeing performance gains with it off?

Grand Master

ViperAFK

Posted
Posted
I turn off Windows Defender and disable its service, Avast already does active scanning for spyware too, don't need two 2 programs doing the same thing.

Windows Search, cause I don't really do much file system searching at all, and when I do I'm fine with the extra ten seconds or so to do it.

Sidebar, cause its just useless to me and never found any gadgets that I reallyyy needed.

System restore, cause its just a waste of drive space and I keep very good backups on my own.

Readyboost service disabled, cause I just neverr use it.

Windows Firewall, I use Comodo.

Security Center, cause its just useless to me. I know the status of my security.

Uh, thats bout it. I've grown to prefer UAC on. I am curious bout SuperFetch now tho, never even tried turning it off. People really seeing performance gains with it off?

if you have 2 gb of ram or more it will only make your system slower if you disbale it.

Grand Master

CPressland

Posted
Posted

Well, I was just playing around with a Virtual Machine of Windows Vista Home Premium on my MacBook starting with 512MB of RAM and slowly moving up the ranks going up to 1.8GB of RAM (I only have 2GB of RAM and Leopard needs at least 200MB of RAM to function properly).

I can safely say that Vista was a LOT faster with SuperFetch OFF on anything below 1GB of RAM, however anything above 1GB SuperFetch was really helping.

For example

Firefox Web Browser 3.1 - 1.5GB of RAM

With Superfetch = 0.8 second load time

Without Superfetch = 3.7 second load time

Microsoft Word 2007 - 1.5GB of RAM

With Superfetch = 2 second load time

Without Superfetch = 12 seconds load time

Obviously I cannot check games as the virtual machine can only render DX7 graphics and i've got nothing that old :D but by the looks of things superfetch DOES dump everything when going into a full screen application. I saw my RAM useage jump from 82% to 12% in a matter of seconds, not paged to disk, dumped!

Superfetch does work in most normal situations, dont disable it.

EDIT: Forgot to mention boot times,

With SuperFetch an Extra 20 seconds, no big deal.

Enthusiast

jhunt31

Posted
Posted

I disabled UAC because I think it is really annoying. I'm the only user of my PC so it's my fault if something goes wrong and I don't need UAC holding my hand and constantly popping up. :p

Also have disabled the sidebar because I don't use it.

Proficient

anonymous_user

Posted
Posted
Whats the point in buying Vista and disabling the features that make it!?!?!

Maybe because not everyone uses all the features of Vista?

As for the original question, I get rid lots of stuff: sidebar, search indexing, system restore, superfetch, etc...

vLite FTW! :punk:

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