features you disabled in Vista?

By Hani
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Grand Master

Mordkanin

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The session thing UAC does that ends up disabling Aero (Temporarily at least)

It's probably for security, stability, and performance.

The Secure desktop is supposed to be impenetrable. If you add the DWM, you're potentially adding an attack vector. As well, running the DWM on another desktop would add considerable resource usage and most likely making the transition even worse.

If you watch the task manager after startup, you can see the cached memory meter fill up, and free memory drop to zero within a few minutes. On my old laptop, this caused considerable slowness. On my new laptop, and on any other machine I've used, I've never noticed it causing any performance issues. (Which is kind of funny, because my old laptop had a faster hard drive than my new one). After that fills up, the excessive hard drive usage should stop.

Keep in mind that Vista is reading (in some cases) several gigabytes of data off of the harddrive as low priority, which means that it's going to be skipping around/relinquishing control to other apps which are also starting up. That takes more than a few seconds.

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Grand Master

ThisSiteHasLostItsCharm

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I've started using vista with superfetch turned off, it's made a hell of a difference.

the desktop appears roughly 2 seconds after the welcom text appears on screen, usually the welcome text stays on screen for roughly 30 seconds before the desktop shows up.

the hdd thrashing is gone, usually it thrashes for 2-3 mintues after the desktop shows up.

advantage, get to use my pc quickly, i know superfetch on or off has been discussed a lot, but its not really needed imo. the standard prefetching is enough, for 4 days I noticed no change in program load speeds. also disabling readyboost did not affect my boot time.

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Gally

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Why disable sidebar? I am a huge fan of having disk space, weather forecast, and network usage displayed to me right on the desktop.

Because I'm not a huge fan of having programs i don't need or want running.

UAC and Sidebar only.

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Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

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It's probably for security, stability, and performance.

The Secure desktop is supposed to be impenetrable. If you add the DWM, you're potentially adding an attack vector. As well, running the DWM on another desktop would add considerable resource usage and most likely making the transition even worse.

...

Yeah, but "meh"

I like UAC and I keep it enabled, I just hope MS streamlines it and makes it less annoying in Windows 7, maybe then people will stop disabling it for silly reasons.

Edit: I disabled the sidebar for a few reasons, mainly 99% of my time is spent in full-screen apps and I haven't found any widgets I like (I've found one for the Dashboard in OS X).

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Grand Master

spacer

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I disabled Dreamscene. It was cool at first, but then I noticed I never actually see much of my desktop while I'm using my computer. It's either completely blocked by games/movies, or I have so many windows up I can only see a sliver of desktop. So, in the interest of saving processor time, I went back to static image backgrounds.

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Grand Master

Hani

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I've started using vista with superfetch turned off, it's made a hell of a difference.

the desktop appears roughly 2 seconds after the welcom text appears on screen, usually the welcome text stays on screen for roughly 30 seconds before the desktop shows up.

the hdd thrashing is gone, usually it thrashes for 2-3 mintues after the desktop shows up.

advantage, get to use my pc quickly, i know superfetch on or off has been discussed a lot, but its not really needed imo. the standard prefetching is enough, for 4 days I noticed no change in program load speeds. also disabling readyboost did not affect my boot time.

Glad to see turning it off helped!

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Grand Master

raskren

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I have to LOL at all the people that disable Superfetch, Readyboost, search indexing, UAC and Aero.

Why are earth would you even use Vista? If you want an OS devoid of features there's Windows XP or even Windows 2000.

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darthblader

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I have disabled nothing. I have never actually had any problems with Vista at all.

When I first built my PC in 2007 UAC bothered me but then I had allowed everything so it very rarely pops up now. I have upgraded the CPU since then to a Quad core and a bit more RAM making 3gb but apart from that the system hasnt changed.

Vista idles at 300mb or just over, cpu sits on 1%, hdd never gets thrashed or anything.

Maybe i was one of the lucky ones but i never saw the benefit to disabling anything as my PC ran perfect and never got and lag on opening anything or any games.

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Grand Master

Hani

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I have disabled nothing. I have never actually had any problems with Vista at all.

When I first built my PC in 2007 UAC bothered me but then I had allowed everything so it very rarely pops up now. I have upgraded the CPU since then to a Quad core and a bit more RAM making 3gb but apart from that the system hasnt changed.

Vista idles at 300mb or just over, cpu sits on 1%, hdd never gets thrashed or anything.

Maybe i was one of the lucky ones but i never saw the benefit to disabling anything as my PC ran perfect and never got and lag on opening anything or any games.

300MB?? That's impossible. With all the mentioned features disabled, Vista idles at 600-700MB (at least on my PC).

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Typhon

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Windows Features I removed are.

Games,Print Services, Tablet Pc Optional Components, Meeting Spaces, Fax and Scan, Windows DFS.

For services.

Windows Search because it is useless for me, Windows Firewall,Defender cause it sucks,Security Center cause it sucks, UAC cause I do not need it, all Diagnostic Services cause they are useless. More but no time to list them all.

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HeartsOfWar

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Disabling core system features of Vista (UAC, Superfetch, etc) is an absolute waste of your time, money, and machine.

UAC - If you do anything, on a regular basis that requires a prompt via UAC and you're a "Standard User", you're doing something wrong... seriously. Although, Microsoft does need to make it so that if you're an "Administrator", you shouldn't see any prompts. However, shame on those people that use an "Administrator" account on a regular basis...

SuperFetch - It's meant to increase application start times based on the users habits and most used applications. So all those people claiming Vista performed better with superFetch off under 1GB aren't properly testing the feature. You would need to setup a VM, and regularly perform certain tasks at specific intervals to properly give the SuperFetch AI room to work and then test the times. I would say a week of activity would be enough. Also, throwing in curve-balls would be acceptable too, but you should expect it to have a negative outcome.

Search Indexing - A little up in the air, but if you don't search that often, I would think you could spend some extra time and limit the indexing instead of disabling it. Vista caches HDD reads / writes to memory, so indexing on Vista is tremendously faster and a lot more efficient. You'll barely notice it if your HDD is a SATA 1.5gb/s 7200RPMs and higher.

Aero - Most of the "eye candy" is dependent on the GPU and VRAM, which you barely even use outside of playing a game. Guess what else, Vista automatically disables Aero when you're playing a game in full screen mode, so you don't get a performance hit because of it. The performance hit you see is a combination of the DX10 implementation and drivers. So, go ahead, disable Aero and let your video card waste 90% of it's life doing nothing.

ReadyBoost - A feature that will dramatically improve performance on machines with very little / slow memory provided you have the hardware. Regardless, this is a very situational feature, I can understand disabling it if needed.

System Protection - Another situational feature that I understand disabling. Some people are very meticulous in their back-ups already (like me)

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Community Regular

waruikoohii

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UAC - If you do anything, on a regular basis that requires a prompt via UAC and you're a "Standard User", you're doing something wrong... seriously. Although, Microsoft does need to make it so that if you're an "Administrator", you shouldn't see any prompts. However, shame on those people that use an "Administrator" account on a regular basis...
If you use the actual Administrator account, then you don't get UAC prompts.

If you use user created administrator accounts, you get Admin Approval Mode prompts.

If you use a standard user account, you have to plug your password into the UAC box.

So Microsoft has already done that. The account is just disabled by default in order to prevent most people from using it. If people used it all the time, the security advantage over XP would shrink quite a bit.

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Grand Master

Mordkanin

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ReadyBoost - A feature that will dramatically improve performance on machines with very little / slow memory provided you have the hardware. Regardless, this is a very situational feature, I can understand disabling it if needed.

Disabling the ReadyBoost service also disables ReadyBoot, a performance feature.

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Veteran

xpgeek

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Disabling the ReadyBoost service also disables ReadyBoot, a performance feature.

Does some searching, what is ReadyBoot.

Hmmm, didn't know that. Always just assumed ReadyBoost was a useless service if don't use the thumb drives as more ram thing.

Turns ReadyBoost service back on.

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iZoom

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I disable Search for the sole fact that i NEVER search and can't think of time that I have in the last 3+ years.

Other stuff I have tried on and off and don't really see a noticeable difference over the course of a month. I guess its just my user habits.

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Grand Master

Mordkanin

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Have noticed a definite improvement in my bootup time now with ReadyBoot back on.

As you should. It does some fancy optimizations to try and make it so that the next time you reboot, it's faster.

I'm pretty sure that ReadyBoot helps out the most with more RAM, which makes it slightly ironic that it's housed in the same service as a feature designed to help out RAM limited PCs.

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Experienced

bobbytomorow

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Unfortunately I still have to use Vista at and for work but at home I have disabled it altogether by wiping it off my primary machines. It doesn't make sense to run a slower os just to disable all of its "features". Might as well save the hassle and not use it at all.

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