new KB959233: Speeding up Windows Vista

By franzon
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Mercellus

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I'm surprised these walkthroughs actually made it to the Microsoft knowledge base. They are recommending things that were previously said to be false.

For example, "Speeding up Windows Vista Part 4: Deactivating Windows Aero". The Desktop Window Manager (DWM) and Windows Aero were designed to offload drawing of graphical elements to the graphics processor instead of using the CPU. Now, in previous versions of Windows you had GDI+, which provided hardware acceleration for the drawing of graphical elements (windows, buttons, etc)... however, GDI+ hardware acceleration is not present in Windows Vista and therefore turning off DWM on a Windows Aero capable computer can actually hurt performance in some ways.

It would be more feasible for the author of these knowledge base articles to instruct customers to disable the "Animate during minimizing and maximizing of windows" settings found in the Advanced System Settings control panel item, which will provide a speed boost to Windows Aero in terms of responsiveness.

Another example is "Speeding up Windows Vista Part 6: Deactivating unused hardware", where the author recommends that you disable the network card in the computer. In my opinion, this step is completely pointless and there's no need to disable the network card just to achieve a faster system startup.

As for this tip in regards to changing the number of processors/processor cores available to the operating system using the System Configuration Utility, it is absolutely pointless as well. Why? That option does not force Windows to use 2 cores during start-up, it is intended to limit the amount of processors or cores available to Windows for troubleshooting purposes. The same applies with the MAXMEM setting that is available.

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mclaren05

Posted
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Can anyone actually say it improves system speed. I saw one person say 7 seconds (impressive, by all stadards)..and everyone else said it's garbage.

Let me make your mind up for you:

Microsoft (the ones who write the code in the operation system known as Windows, package it up, and release it to you) say that this speeds up Windows Vista.

Some guy/girl/thing on a internet forum which has I believe 8 years on the internet, while Microsoft has been writing and improving Windows since 1985, says its garbage.

Who do you believe?

Grand Master

+Ryster Subscriber²

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I'm sorry, but if they are purposely limiting it to 1 processor and a fix that simple lets it use more than one, why the heck haven't they patched windows to enable the max number of processors through automatic updates?

Are they content to let the world+dog potter along on a single CPU?

Grand Master

+Ryster Subscriber²

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Well forgive the double post, but I just tried this on my own PC. I've got a Quad core CPU and set this value to 4.

I don't have any figures, cause I never bothered to time it before and after, but my bootup now seems to be faster. Also after putting in my password, all my system tray icons seem to appear much quicker than they used to.

Now I do have dual hard drives configured as Raid 0, so perhaps my hard drive wasn't the bottleneck, as others have guessed.

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Nagisan

Posted
Posted
Well forgive the double post, but I just tried this on my own PC. I've got a Quad core CPU and set this value to 4.

I don't have any figures, cause I never bothered to time it before and after, but my bootup now seems to be faster. Also after putting in my password, all my system tray icons seem to appear much quicker than they used to.

Now I do have dual hard drives configured as Raid 0, so perhaps my hard drive wasn't the bottleneck, as others have guessed.

I'm similar to what you said, it seems slightly faster (didnt cut boot time in half or anything, but it feels quicker) I also changed the other tweak with the Hard drive thing.....I have a UPS that can keep my computer running for around 15 minutes if I lose power, so I figured I dont need to worry about dataloss if I suddenly lose power. That really seemed to help, before, running Opera right after boot, it took awhile to open and start loading tabs, now its practically instant.

Also, I have a weird "problem"......I am the only user of my computer, so I set it to autologin my account. However, when I get logged in, all my tray applications are already running, this includes Everest, AnyDVD, Ultramon Google Talk, and a few other random ones. I do not have a problem with this (nicer seeing everything running the second it logs in), but I was wondering if anyone else has this behavior and if its normal. Its almost like its taking longer to log in, which allows it to load everything.

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Ficman

Posted
Posted

I've never really noticed any big difference on this setting, I've seen maybe a 1 second difference between the 1, 2 and 4 setting I can use... I just left it at 1 and called it a day... Nothing noticeable, I have seen several tweaking pages say this makes a LOT of difference though. I sure didn't see that...

:cool:

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Jason S. Global Moderator

Posted
  • Global Moderator
Posted
Let me make your mind up for you:

Microsoft (the ones who write the code in the operation system known as Windows, package it up, and release it to you) say that this speeds up Windows Vista.

Some guy/girl/thing on a internet forum which has I believe 8 years on the internet, while Microsoft has been writing and improving Windows since 1985, says its garbage.

Who do you believe?

i believe the subsequent tests i did w/ a stopwatch. zero difference.

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zhangm Supervisor

Posted
  • Supervisor
Posted
Let me make your mind up for you:

Microsoft (the ones who write the code in the operation system known as Windows, package it up, and release it to you) say that this speeds up Windows Vista.

Some guy/girl/thing on a internet forum which has I believe 8 years on the internet, while Microsoft has been writing and improving Windows since 1985, says its garbage.

Who do you believe?

I'm sure the person who wrote that KB article was intimately involved in the coding of every single version of Windows and knows it inside and out. I mean, you clearly have to be a Microsoft programmer with 15 years of coding experience to be able to cut out a mouse graphic like that.

Placebo effect.

Proficient

Mercellus

Posted
Posted
I inform them all the time...with my wallet, by not buying any of their products ;)

While it is a smart gesture, I doubt that Microsoft will feel any pain if one less person bought their products. Now, if only people would stop purchasing Windows in droves, that might work... mind you, it won't happen, because 99% of PCs are meant to run Windows.

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Mercellus

Posted
Posted
How about part 5 (Speeding up the hard drive)? Does enabling write caching for the hard disk speed up the hard disk?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/959235/EN-US/

Please keep in mind that you should only enable enhanced disk caching if you have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) that you know is good and will last long enough for you to shut down your computer properly, otherwise you could lose data or corrupt files on your hard disk.

Proficient

Mercellus

Posted
Posted
Ok. Thanks for the information. Is it crucial to have a backup power supply if I just enable "Enable write caching on the disk" and not "Enable advanced performance"?

I believe write caching is enabled by default in any case, regardless of whether or not your computer is a notebook or a desktop. It's the "advanced performance" option that enables another type of caching which, while it can speed up your system a little bit, can be very risky at the same time if the power is interrupted.

Grand Master

Nagisan

Posted
Posted
I believe write caching is enabled by default in any case, regardless of whether or not your computer is a notebook or a desktop. It's the "advanced performance" option that enables another type of caching which, while it can speed up your system a little bit, can be very risky at the same time if the power is interrupted.

Any other info besides "another type of caching"? I recently enabled this option as I have a UPS that can run my computer (under little-no load) for about 15 minutes, so I enabled this option, though it seems to help a bit, I would like to know exactly what it does. :p

Proficient

Mercellus

Posted
Posted
Any other info besides "another type of caching"? I recently enabled this option as I have a UPS that can run my computer (under little-no load) for about 15 minutes, so I enabled this option, though it seems to help a bit, I would like to know exactly what it does. :p

By default, Windows will cache write operations, with the advanced performance option it will cache both read and write operations to speed things up ever so slightly. There's probably a lot more of a technical explanation out there, perhaps on TechNet or MSDN.

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darkz

Posted
Posted

whoever does not believe, take the chronometer.

with one core it was a minute, with two cores it's 50.51 seconds

from the point where bios logo is just to show up, to the point where startup starts loading ;p

Ok. Thanks for the information. Is it crucial to have a backup power supply if I just enable "Enable write caching on the disk" and not "Enable advanced performance"?

back in the days when i didn't had an ups, i used advanced performance option anyway. a few times the power went off, but nothing bad happened. maybe i was just lucky. surely do this only on drives where you don't have any hard-to-replace data :)

Grand Master

primexx

Posted
Posted

looking at the other articles, i'm not inclined to just take this one at face value, they look like they're written by some amateur who has nothing to do with the windows team.

either that or it's written for really stupid people with really crappy computers.

Grand Master

itsnotabigtruck

Posted
Posted

I'm pretty sure what this option actually does is override the number of cores the kernel uses. If taskman is already showing two cores, doing this is completely pointless.

Remember, just because this article made it to the MS site doesn't mean it was written by someone who has a clue what they're talking about.

Proficient

jamesVault

Posted
Posted (edited)

may be Windows is able to autodetect the number of cores only after the boot is ended, so this option allows the boot process to be informed about the number of cores and start the boot process in parallel mode?

but why Microsoft didn't enable this option automatically?

why the boot process doesn't read the number of cores from the hardware config saved in the registry?

This is a mistery...

Edited by jamesVault
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