Tweaks for Faster Windows 7

[Night Prowler]

Hi All,

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit with 4GB of RAM on a Dell XPS 410. What a difference from XP! I have been reading around and saw many ?speed tips or tweaks? that have made the OS even faster. However some say a particular tweak works and others say that it does not. Is there a reliable tweaking tutorial that can be posted or a link to a tutorial? Thanks for any help.

CUBE

Look, another statistic for the Apple people. Windows 7 is like your Grandmas best apple pie. So, why would you want to change it. Add another 4GB of ram, SSD, and the biggest processor available for your dell. There is absolutly no tweaks available that will make it faster or more reliable.

[Billus]

Just use a defragger to keep the hard drives up to speed (unless you use an SSD). Honestly, registry cleaners are crap and are not even needed; all they do is run a few guesses and then BAM!, computer blue screens, invalid shortcuts blah blah blah. XP was the only OS worth tweaking because it was simply garbage. Since Vista, Windows manages to keep itself clean and up to speed. Just disable any unneeded programs upon startup to quicken things up a bit but for the love off God, don't download these ridiculous tools.

[Night Prowler]

out of all you said only perhaps 30% makes sense to do while the rest IMHO is either a waste of time or does nothing if anything. i used to believe that cleaning the registry did something but now i don't believe it does anything only cause problems.

Give this guy a gold star!!!! Most of that stuff is crap!!!

[kjx]

Give this guy a gold star!!!! Most of that stuff is crap!!!

And you are basing this off? Something you read somewhere? I take system performance tweaking very seriously - I've probably read every article you have (if you research a lot) and tried almost everything I've read to see for myself, on top of discovering things on my own. I test things the hard way often pushing till I break something - I must have reinstalled Windows (95 onwards) some 100+ times on systems (2 desktops and 5 laptops over 18 years + friends' systems), including Windows 7 five times on my own system and installed+tweaked 8 other times for friends and family. I've been thanked profusely every single time, because they've never seen their system perform so fast.

I'm basing my points off my own experiences and all the e-mails I get every single day thanking me for the performance increases people see from using DiskMax (over 200,000 installs, a 35,000 strong user base, and 4700 fans on facebook). So before you dismiss what I'm saying with 2 simple sentences take a long hard look and tell me precisely what I'm stating wrong with verifiable proof (I will not blindly agree to what somebody says no matter how respected they are IF I have the means to check/verify their claims; for example: Ed Bott says clearing prefetch is useless -> true, for the vast majority this is the safest route to follow; but there are times when you do need to clear it and it's not always easy to explain to a layman, who might misunderstand, what those situations are - which is arguably why he made such a blanket statement).

Even though I strongly believe in what I say, I will not say that what I advocate will work as well for everyone because unless I can present my findings in a scientifically reproducible manner, my claims are only as good as any other (except for the benefit of the doubt my credentials might give me). And again, I present my experiences and methods in good faith - there's nothing I gain from pushing useless information that will degrade somebody's system's performance.

[Udedenkz]

Just installed Ccleaner for the heck of it and you know what it found? Temporary internet files (that deletes itself when my browser closes) and some stuff in my recycle bin and a few other little files that's not hurting a single thing. Did a registry scan and it found like 12 things, some missing shared DLLs (about 8) and unused extentions.

Seriously people? Seriously?

Granted this system isn't that old, i formatted on March 30, 2010 so not much gunk on here but even with all the stuff i've been installing to test and all that. It only found some cookies, and temp internet files that i can delete myself?

I think you missing the point then. That is what it is supposed to do -

[Night Prowler]

And you are basing this off? Something you read somewhere? I take system performance tweaking very seriously - I've probably read every article you have (if you research a lot) and tried almost everything I've read to see for myself, on top of discovering things on my own. I test things the hard way often pushing till I break something - I must have reinstalled Windows (95 onwards) some 100+ times on systems (2 desktops and 5 laptops over 18 years + friends' systems), including Windows 7 five times on my own system and installed+tweaked 8 other times for friends and family. I've been thanked profusely every single time, because they've never seen their system perform so fast.

I'm basing my points off my own experiences and all the e-mails I get every single day thanking me for the performance increases people see from using DiskMax (over 200,000 installs, a 35,000 strong user base, and 4700 fans on facebook). So before you dismiss what I'm saying with 2 simple sentences take a long hard look and tell me precisely what I'm stating wrong with verifiable proof (I will not blindly agree to what somebody says no matter how respected they are IF I have the means to check/verify their claims; for example: Ed Bott says clearing prefetch is useless -> true, for the vast majority this is the safest route to follow; but there are times when you do need to clear it and it's not always easy to explain to a layman, who might misunderstand, what those situations are - which is arguably why he made such a blanket statement).

Even though I strongly believe in what I say, I will not say that what I advocate will work as well for everyone because unless I can present my findings in a scientifically reproducible manner, my claims are only as good as any other (except for the benefit of the doubt my credentials might give me). And again, I present my experiences and methods in good faith - there's nothing I gain from pushing useless information that will degrade somebody's system's performance.

People like you are the reason why Apple are able to use those commericials aginest Microsoft. Reinstalling Windows 100+ times; that says it all. Windows 7 is by far the BEST OS that Microsoft has came out with. It does NOT need to be tweaked at all. It just does not. If you want use CCleaner to root thru the registry and your in Internet cache to clean them, I see nothing wrong with that, but that is not tweaking.

IMHO; anyone that has reinstalled their OS over a 100+ times, I would not give their advise a second thought. I'm not an advocate of tweaking becuse there are correct ways to increase speed. Most, or all of these tweaks will give the end user nothing visiable in speed increases, and only give them a computer that will simply not preform any better and be unreliable.

I've been in the business for 25 years and made more profit from work orders revolving around people tweaking their OS to make them run faster, then any other single issue. If a users system gets to a point where it's sluggish becuse of the crap they have installed then it's time to refresh their OS, not run some hack called DiskMax, or any other so called tweaking program. Anyone that advocates users do that, is simply taking advantage of the user, or customer.

[Guest xiphi]

Just installed Ccleaner for the heck of it and you know what it found? Temporary internet files (that deletes itself when my browser closes) and some stuff in my recycle bin and a few other little files that's not hurting a single thing. Did a registry scan and it found like 12 things, some missing shared DLLs (about 8) and unused extentions.

Seriously people? Seriously?

Granted this system isn't that old, i formatted on March 30, 2010 so not much gunk on here but even with all the stuff i've been installing to test and all that. It only found some cookies, and temp internet files that i can delete myself?

What did you expect? It's more of a one-stop clean up application rather than a "magically inject speed into your system" application. I mean, heck, it's called CCleaner for a reason. Naturally, how much crap it finds depends on how you use your PC.

[Roger H. Veteran]

What did you expect? It's more of a one-stop clean up application rather than a "magically inject speed into your system" application. I mean, heck, it's called CCleaner for a reason. Naturally, how much crap it finds depends on how you use your PC.

Everyone here suggests it like it's just that, "Magic speed injection" like a shot of nitros or something. Their solution to getting rid of a small bug problem is to nuclear bomb the house. That'll teach those stupid bugs!

Anyways, Windows 7 as i said did all of what it wanted to do and in some cases automatically. You can set IE to auto clean your temp files whenever the browser is closed and has been there since IE5 or 6. The registry stuff can be solved by not installing tons of stupid software to "tweak" system which ends up leaving more crap behind that you'll need to clean out (start vicious circle). Yes it makes it simple and easy to just click a button and be rid of everything all in one shot. Being proactive instead of reactive should be the solution. I have Windows Vista machines that are years old with installs from OEM and they run just as fast as ever. Only change i did was to put in more RAM (OEMs charge too much for RAM so i ordered them with bare amounts and bought RAM on Newegg instead).

Now for CCleaner, not saying it's not good for what it does. Worked great but what it does do but it wouldn't fix any real problem that Windows would have IMO. Having a ton of files on your PC doesn't slow it down (except for searching). Having a ton of stupid software does and CCleaner doesn't clean out any of that.

[soonerproud]

People like you are the reason why Apple are able to use those commericials aginest Microsoft. Reinstalling Windows 100+ times; that says it all. Windows 7 is by far the BEST OS that Microsoft has came out with. It does NOT need to be tweaked at all. It just does not. If you want use CCleaner to root thru the registry and your in Internet cache to clean them, I see nothing wrong with that, but that is not tweaking.

IMHO; anyone that has reinstalled their OS over a 100+ times, I would not give their advise a second thought. I'm not an advocate of tweaking becuse there are correct ways to increase speed. Most, or all of these tweaks will give the end user nothing visiable in speed increases, and only give them a computer that will simply not preform any better and be unreliable.

I've been in the business for 25 years and made more profit from work orders revolving around people tweaking their OS to make them run faster, then any other single issue. If a users system gets to a point where it's sluggish becuse of the crap they have installed then it's time to refresh their OS, not run some hack called DiskMax, or any other so called tweaking program. Anyone that advocates users do that, is simply taking advantage of the user, or customer.

+1

I bet if we put my untweaked PC along side his tweaked PC, mine would be a much better overall experience and his PC would either be slightly slower (Some tweaks like turning off Aero which offloads drawing the screen to the GPU thus easing load on the CPU and the Readyboost service, that runs the Readyboot service which speeds boot times over a small period of time hurt performance.) or not perceptively faster than mine if all our other specs were equal. People who incessantly tweak Windows lack knowledge of the technologies behind Windows 7, such as low priority IO which gives programs priority to CPU cycles over Windows functions or services triggers which only runs services as long as needed and then shuts them off. Windows XP was the last Microsoft os that required tweaking to get the best performance out of it.

Microsoft has listened to end users and made performance a high priority with both Vista SP1 and Windows 7 so people no longer have to rely on tweaks to get the best experience possible. It is time to move on from the days of constant tweaking and just enjoy your computers.

[Night Prowler]

+1

I bet if we put my untweaked PC along side his tweaked PC, mine would be a much better overall experience and his PC would either be slightly slower (Some tweaks like turning off Aero which offloads drawing the screen to the GPU thus easing load on the CPU and the Readyboost service, that runs the Readyboot service which speeds boot times over a small period of time hurt performance.) or not perceptively faster than mine if all our other specs were equal. People who incessantly tweak Windows lack knowledge of the technologies behind Windows 7, such as low priority IO which gives programs priority to CPU cycles over Windows functions or services triggers which only runs services as long as needed and then shuts them off. Windows XP was the last Microsoft os that required tweaking to get the best performance out of it.

Microsoft has listened to end users and made performance a high priority with both Vista SP1 and Windows 7 so people no longer have to rely on tweaks to get the best experience possible. It is time to move on from the days of constant tweaking and just enjoy your computers.

The thing is; just for clarification. Turning Aero off is not a tweak, just like defragging the HD is not a tweak, or invoking ReadyBoost. I have never seen any good come from tweaking.

XP was worth tweaking, and Vista was crap <IMHO>, until SP2 was released. I finally updated to Vista when SP2 was released and it was very stable, but wasn't worth tweaking. At the point when I finally installed Vista it was as reliable as XP.

Bottom line is; there really isn't one good reason to tweak on Windows 7. I think all these people that are giving advice about what to tweak are maybe employed by Apple, or hired by Apple to distribute these crap tweaking programs that causes Windows to be unstable.

Hum; A conspiracy....

[Phenom II]

Tweaks for a faster Windows 7 ? What are you running it on.... a PIII ? :laugh:

[Phenom II]

I was running it fine with my 6000+ till I upgraded but my laptop is running Ultimate with 2gb / 2.1ghz x2 / 8200m graphics extremely well

[Roger H. Veteran]

Well just in general it does use about 350-800 mb of system ram just to run it, where as xp is a tad lower. Actually im running an old 6000x2 with asus mobo,/crys i want new stuff

Once again with the madness. You can install Windows with 512MB of RAM and it will only use 300-400MB, shut down the system and put in another 2GB without changing anything it will automatically start using 800MB on idle without changing a single thing. That's cuz the OS is aware of the amount of RAM you have in the system and allocates more for itself to run the system better and faster.

[kjx]

People like you are the reason why Apple are able to use those commericials aginest Microsoft. Reinstalling Windows 100+ times; that says it all. Windows 7 is by far the BEST OS that Microsoft has came out with. It does NOT need to be tweaked at all. It just does not. If you want use CCleaner to root thru the registry and your in Internet cache to clean them, I see nothing wrong with that, but that is not tweaking.

IMHO; anyone that has reinstalled their OS over a 100+ times, I would not give their advise a second thought. I'm not an advocate of tweaking becuse there are correct ways to increase speed. Most, or all of these tweaks will give the end user nothing visiable in speed increases, and only give them a computer that will simply not preform any better and be unreliable.

I've been in the business for 25 years and made more profit from work orders revolving around people tweaking their OS to make them run faster, then any other single issue. If a users system gets to a point where it's sluggish becuse of the crap they have installed then it's time to refresh their OS, not run some hack called DiskMax, or any other so called tweaking program. Anyone that advocates users do that, is simply taking advantage of the user, or customer.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with Windows 7 as it is. If you use it normally, installing just the apps you need, never installing any newer apps just to try them out, doing some general housekeeping from time to time, and keeping your system up to date, it is unlikely you'll ever face a situation where you will have to reinstall Windows. The performance will be very good most of the time, but it is not the absolute best it can be, no matter how much you want to convince yourself that. My 100+ reinstalls (across all Windows versions, and for several machines - not just my own) have nothing to do with Windows 7 specifically - I try to be specific in my statements but like some others on this forum, you take out the interpretation that suits your point of view best.

There something you'll notice about the NTFS filesystem - it's performance gets worse as it "ages". I have a separate partition of about 10GB holding a lot of small documents (<3MB each usually). This is to make it easier to transition from one Windows installation to another. But anyway, as I delete old documents, create/copy new ones, eventually even with defragging+chkdsk, file operations like copying 300 small files from a pen drive start taking longer. It's not the throughput of either drive that is causing the bottleneck - it's the time taken to create the file entry in the file table at the destination. And no, the MFT is not fragmented when I check.

And do you know what brings back the old performance? Copying all the files out, reformatting the partition and copying everything back.

If anything, this is an indication of a file system issue that is independent of any core Windows influence. Taking it forward, it is possible that this could also explain performance slow downs on an old partition holding Windows despite there being nothing wrong with any Windows settings, etc. I'm not implying that I am 100% right but given the experience I have described and making reasonable assumptions, would that not be a case to reformat the Windows partition and reinstall/reimage?

Your definition of tweaking is with respect to tweaking Windows - from what I understand you are refering to changing settings; my definition of tweaking is with respect to tweaking perfomance - so in my definition, anything that improves system performance, including something as simple as deleting temporary internet files, is tweaking. And in that context, DiskMax is a tweaking application. Going by your definition, it's only a junk cleaner because it does not really change any of your system settings.

I bet if we put my untweaked PC along side his tweaked PC, mine would be a much better overall experience and his PC would either be slightly slower (Some tweaks like turning off Aero which offloads drawing the screen to the GPU thus easing load on the CPU and the Readyboost service, that runs the Readyboot service which speeds boot times over a small period of time hurt performance.) or not perceptively faster than mine if all our other specs were equal.

I can bet mine will be faster given similar system specs (IF you have not tweaked anything). Why?

1. Every system I have tweaked has worked faster both in timed measures and perceptively through the eyes of the respective owners of the machines (both system startup and general application performance). Without an exception.

2. I am not sure what importance you'll give to PCPitstop scores but, for what its worth, I have always gotten significantly better system performance scores going from an untweaked installation to a tweaked one.

I do not turn off Aero. I do not turn off ReadyBoost because it works to speed up the boot process. You assume I do not know what I am talking about, stating things that anyone with half an interest in Windows would know.

People who incessantly tweak Windows lack knowledge of the technologies behind Windows 7, such as low priority IO which gives programs priority to CPU cycles over Windows functions or services triggers which only runs services as long as needed and then shuts them off.

Please stop making blanket statements by over-generalizing. It's kind of like saying people who incessantly tweak cars lack knowledge of the tech (YES, there are probably many people who know very little, but assuming that EVERYONE is like it is plain insulting). The services' settings by default are optimized for the average Windows user (admittedly the defaults are much better than they were in Vista) - if you are clear about your requirements and how you use your system, and you know what the services do and their interdependencies, there is significant scope for improving system performance and reducing memory usage.

[JonathanMarston]

I'm surprised so many suggest disabling system restore. It's saved me from needing to reinstall multiple times in the past. I also use it as a simple way to backup the registry before making any edits...

[kjx]

I'm surprised so many suggest disabling system restore. It's saved me from needing to reinstall multiple times in the past. I also use it as a simple way to backup the registry before making any edits...

Disable system restore only if you are ok with having to reinstall/reimage. I've personally never been happy with the way system restore works and I've had restore failed errors in the past - so I just disable it altogether. I'm not endorsing disabling it, I'm just saying that if you are sure you are not going to use it, you might as well disable it. But remember, shadow copies needs system restore enabled to work.

If all you want to do is back up your registry, you can use an application called ERUNT.

[cjbeckwith]

What I do when I want to run random things that I don't necessarily trust, is to do it in a virtual machine.

Definitely agree with a VM for apps that you want to test. Why would you install in your primary O.S. and end up having to re-install every 3 months. Not a good practice. VM's are great. Take a snapshot, install the app, test. If it works as advertised, commit the snapshot. Otherwise simply revert back to the previous state and remove the snapshot.

[mrp04]

Just don't do anything. Change any personal preferences but don't make any "tweaks." Never had good experiences and they just break stuff. Windows 7 runs perfectly as it is.

[soonerproud]

I can bet mine will be faster given similar system specs (IF you have not tweaked anything). Why?

1. Every system I have tweaked has worked faster both in timed measures and perceptively through the eyes of the respective owners of the machines (both system startup and general application performance). Without an exception.

I'm not buying it. I am a reformed tweaker and all tweaked PC's I have fixed for others were worse off because of tweaking. You are experiencing the placebo effect, but the real world results are negligible to none.

2. I am not sure what importance you'll give to PCPitstop scores but, for what its worth, I have always gotten significantly better system performance scores going from an untweaked installation to a tweaked one.

I do not turn off Aero. I do not turn off ReadyBoost because it works to speed up the boot process. You assume I do not know what I am talking about, stating things that anyone with half an interest in Windows would know.

PCPitstop is a joke. The web site owners did nothing but mindlessly bash Vista, even when confronted by facts that they were wrong. The people at that site are still stuck in the XP days and have never left it. They still use Active X, even though they of all people should know better because they are too lazy to move to Java so their test could be accessible to all browsers. They also require the end user to run IE as administrator to conduct the test, which is a security no no because it disables Protected Mode making IE unsafe to run at all. Benchmarks are a poor way to measure real life performance.

I used Aero and Readyboost as an example because these are so called tweaks some sites like PCPitstop have recommended in the past that actually slow down a PC, not speed it up. In certain low RAM cases turning these off may be helpful, but with a gig or more disabling them is counter productive.

Please stop making blanket statements by over-generalizing. It's kind of like saying people who incessantly tweak cars lack knowledge of the tech (YES, there are probably many people who know very little, but assuming that EVERYONE is like it is plain insulting). The services' settings by default are optimized for the average Windows user (admittedly the defaults are much better than they were in Vista) - if you are clear about your requirements and how you use your system, and you know what the services do and their interdependencies, there is significant scope for improving system performance and reducing memory usage.

Quit giving bad tweaking advice and quit telling people to format every three months and I will quit assuming you don't know anything about how Windows works. I am on 7 months on this install and it is as fast if not faster than the day I installed it. I used to be you and incessantly tweaked my PC, thinking I could squeeze more out of it. The fact is my task did not get done any faster nor did my programs run any better, nor did my games run perceptively any better between a tweaked PC and a untweaked PC. In many cases I had issues due to the tweaking that caused more problems than they supposedly solved. Shaving 10 seconds off a boot time does not mean a faster PC. The services settings are now run on triggers, meaning they don't run at all until needed, and only for the length of time needed. There is no need to turn off services, period.

The thing is; just for clarification. Turning Aero off is not a tweak, just like defragging the HD is not a tweak, or invoking ReadyBoost. I have never seen any good come from tweaking.

XP was worth tweaking, and Vista was crap <IMHO>, until SP2 was released. I finally updated to Vista when SP2 was released and it was very stable, but wasn't worth tweaking. At the point when I finally installed Vista it was as reliable as XP.

Bottom line is; there really isn't one good reason to tweak on Windows 7. I think all these people that are giving advice about what to tweak are maybe employed by Apple, or hired by Apple to distribute these crap tweaking programs that causes Windows to be unstable.

Hum; A conspiracy....

Agreed, but I wanted to use those as an example of things many tweakers love to suggest that actually hurt performance, not help it.

[Udedenkz]

EDIT: Quote limit for the loose.

Windows 7 is by far the BEST OS that Microsoft has came out with. It does NOT need to be tweaked at all. It just does not.

Yes I agree with you, same goes for Macs, the do not need tech support / maintenance because they are perfect. Same bloody brilliant logic.

Windows 7 by default is not configured for a specific purpose - this is evident in what services are set to automatic.

Tweaking, or configuring for a specific purpose, leads to a significant performance boost, especially on low-end hardware.

If you want use CCleaner to root thru the registry and your in Internet cache to clean them, I see nothing wrong with that, but that is not tweaking.

It is called maintenance, most people need that, and not actual tweaks. I.E. : Clean boot, Clean, reg-clean, defrag - done.

FYI, CCleaner is a ****-poor registry cleaner. It is good for freeing up hard drive space and perma-saging deleted information.

IMHO; anyone that has reinstalled their OS over a 100+ times, I would not give their advise a second thought. I'm not an advocate of tweaking becuse there are correct ways to increase speed. Most, or all of these tweaks will give the end user nothing visiable in speed increases, and only give them a computer that will simply not preform any better and be unreliable.

Actually, recommending reinstall is sometimes much easier, pain-free, and would save a lot of time.

Visible improvements in boot time, response time, and GUI friendliness can be achieved via. tweaking. Simple de-bloating a pre-installed Windows installation will lead to significant performance increases. Disabling unnecessary functionality will indeed help boot time and reduce RAM usage. Obviously, the disabled functionality will make a computer "unreliable" in that area - duh - that is when you turn those services back to automatic and restart.

I've been in the business for 25 years and made more profit from work orders revolving around people tweaking their OS to make them run faster, then any other single issue. If a users system gets to a point where it's sluggish becuse of the crap they have installed then it's time to refresh their OS, not run some hack called DiskMax, or any other so called tweaking program. Anyone that advocates users do that, is simply taking advantage of the user, or customer.

That is not a tweaking program.

Everyone here suggests it like it's just that, "Magic speed injection" like a shot of nitros or something. Their solution to getting rid of a small bug problem is to nuclear bomb the house. That'll teach those stupid bugs!

Really? Really? Who?

CCleaner is a program for regular maintenance, that is it. It is also reliable, bloat-free, free, and user friendly.

Having a ton of stupid software does and CCleaner doesn't clean out any of that.

I think you can manually add applications somehow. I don't know, popular things like 7-Zip, Office, Firefox, etc seem to work here.

The registry stuff can be solved by not installing tons of stupid software to "tweak" system which ends up leaving more crap behind that you'll need to clean out (start vicious circle).

Wrong. I have noticed way too many applications install more than they uninstall. Leftover registry keys, entries, invalid service entries, files, folders, and other ****.

The registry stuff can be solved by not using a computer. That is the only way.

Being proactive instead of reactive should be the solution. I have Windows Vista machines that are years old with installs from OEM and they run just as fast as ever. 

I know one computer with Vista ~25GB of Vista to be exact.

Once again with the madness. You can install Windows with 512MB of RAM and it will only use 300-400MB, shut down the system and put in another 2GB without changing anything it will automatically start using 800MB on idle without changing a single thing. That's cuz the OS is aware of the amount of RAM you have in the system and allocates more for itself to run the system better and faster.

You are implying that Windows 7 actually runs on 300-400MB RAM, that is if pressured (when initially it was using 800MB on a 2GB system) it will free up the other 400-500MB (I am not talking about prefetch). This is not true. The ~420MB that it uses on my system, it always uses. Your application will give you a low-memory warning instead of Windows magically freeing up RAM (I am not talking about superfetch RAM). Although after usage, W7 indles at ~650 MB, which might budge down back to the startup ~420 MB.

EDIT: Or should I say, that is memory usage is necessary and used for cache? ...

I'm surprised so many suggest disabling system restore. It's saved me from needing to reinstall multiple times in the past. I also use it as a simple way to backup the registry before making any edits...

+1

System restore is necessary, even if, EDIT: deletes all your save points without permission, it still saved my *** a few times.

If all you want to do is back up your registry, you can use an application called ERUNT.

I used registry backups, that is until W7. HDMI Sound permanently stopped working after a registry restore. No System Restore help, no driver reinstall help, just reimage. It took me twice to realize this.

I am on 7 months on this install and it is as fast if not faster than the day I installed it.

Quad Core with Hyper Threading I presume, 8GB RAM I presume, ~300 USD GPU I presume?

I used to be you and incessantly tweaked my PC, thinking I could squeeze more out of it. The fact is my task did not get done any faster nor did my programs run any better, nor did my games run perceptively any better between a tweaked PC and a untweaked PC.

Same thing,

Quad Core with Hyper Threading I presume, 8GB RAM I presume, ~300 USD GPU I presume?

If not, welcome to the world of doing it wrong. EDIT. Simply disabling some services here and there I achieved a performance boost for my netbook W7 install (which FYI, with const. trips here and there, I managed to rack up 15 days of up time - then my battery ran out = problem free stability).

But, if talking about serious tweaking. I used an extremely n-lite Windows XP. It was a ~350MB install, and with themes and drivers used about 85MB RAM, started in ~12 seconds. Perfect for gaming, perfect for watching movies. A non-tweaked install of XP booted in about twice as long and well consumed a lot more RAM. It is kinda of a Q.E.D. type of thing - more space, more free ram for gaming, faster boot - oh and a faster interface esp. Windows explorer. Tweaking a computer to do a certain task and to do it fast (at a cost of doing some other tasks - server work for example) leads to performance improvements which stack up.

I am also not denying that tweaking can, and may intended to destroy functionality in other areas or unintended areas.

 In many cases I had issues due to the tweaking that caused more problems than they supposedly solved. Shaving 10 seconds off a boot time does not mean a faster PC. The services settings are now run on triggers, meaning they don't run at all until needed, and only for the length of time needed. There is no need to turn off services, period.

For example, your problem here is that you set to manual necessary services. This is dumb. If it is necessary it should run, know what it is before touching it. These golden rules - which many break and complain.

Edited April 11, 2010 by Udedenkz

[Marshall Veteran]

I see nothing wrong with using "services.msc" to disable services you don't use or will ever use, some of them hog significant amounts of memory. For instance, I don't plan on ever using remote management so I disabled it. If you want to consider that "Tweaking" then I don't see the problem with it. I've personally disabled about 12 services and my computer runs streamlined, a noticetable difference from factory settings. There's no use in running unnecessary services that most end users likely will never use.

[kjx]

..all tweaked PC's I have fixed for others were worse off because of tweaking. You are experiencing the placebo effect, but the real world results are negligible to none.

That is a reflection of YOUR tweaking abilities and not mine. How can manually timed measurements be classified a placebo effect??? A placebo effect can occur if something feels like it is faster - actual timings measured in a scientific manner cannot be brushed off as being a placebo effect.

PCPitstop is a joke. The web site owners did nothing but mindlessly bash Vista, even when confronted by facts that they were wrong. The people at that site are still stuck in the XP days and have never left it. They still use Active X, even though they of all people should know better because they are too lazy to move to Java so their test could be accessible to all browsers. They also require the end user to run IE as administrator to conduct the test, which is a security no no because it disables Protected Mode making IE unsafe to run at all. Benchmarks are a poor way to measure real life performance.

I used Aero and Readyboost as an example because these are so called tweaks some sites like PCPitstop have recommended in the past that actually slow down a PC, not speed it up. In certain low RAM cases turning these off may be helpful, but with a gig or more disabling them is counter productive.

PCPitstop may have made mistakes - but to the best of my knowledge they have never told people to disable Aero and Readyboost - maybe just Aero because when Vista came out, a sizable chunk of systems did not have powerful enough graphics to handle it. For example, corporate machines where they probably had powerful CPUs but very basic integrated graphics. I agree with you about the ActiveX part of it, and the reduced security.

Quit giving bad tweaking advice and quit telling people to format every three months and I will quit assuming you don't know anything about how Windows works.

I DID NOT TELL ANYONE TO REINSTALL WINDOWS EVERY 3 MONTHS. There is a world of a difference between telling others WHAT I DO and WHAT I ADVISE OTHERS TO DO. I have specific reasons to do what I do, some of which I have already elaborated here. My intention when I revealed that I reinstalled Windows that often was to show that I have considerable practice going from a stock install to a "tweaked" one without refering to any guide. And NOT to imply that everyone should blindy follow my lead.

I am on 7 months on this install and it is as fast if not faster than the day I installed it. I used to be you and incessantly tweaked my PC, thinking I could squeeze more out of it. The fact is my task did not get done any faster nor did my programs run any better, nor did my games run perceptively any better between a tweaked PC and a untweaked PC. In many cases I had issues due to the tweaking that caused more problems than they supposedly solved.

Good for you on the first part - you know how to keep things humming smoothly. Fine. Just because you failed to extract better performance by tweaking your system does not mean nobody else can do it better that you. Tweaking is a risky business and just a single wrong tweak can leave your system slower than stock, and if you've applied a lot of tweaks it'll be hard to identify which one's causing the issue - in my honest opinion, this could possibly explain the bad experiences you've had.

I do not have any experience with overclocking PCs to boast of because the last desktop I had was purchased in 1997. So if I overclocked a system today and burnt the CPU, it does not mean that somebody else cannot do it better.

Shaving 10 seconds off a boot time does not mean a faster PC. The services settings are now run on triggers, meaning they don't run at all until needed, and only for the length of time needed. There is no need to turn off services, period.

Shaving 10 seconds off a 40 second boot time means a 25% improvement in startup performance - I regularly manage to cut a 50 second one to 25-30. If that is not desirable to you, that's just you then. Services take time to start up, and unwanted services that are loaded use up memory needlessly. So if you know that a service is very likely to be required, you can at least set it to Automatically (delayed start) if not Automatically. Services you know you won't use can be disabled - for example if you know you will never use a wireless connection, you can disable associated services. Similarly for Tablet PC components, and IPv6 support, and many more like that. But the assumption here is that you intimately know how services work. And like you already mentioned, a wrong setting can drastically reduce system performance - for example, disabling readyboost can shoot a 40 second startup to a minute and a half or even two. A person who follows a "service guide" to tweak his services will not be able to identify the problem easily. But if you invest the time to learn, it will reap you dividends. At one point of time, I had Windows Vista booting in 26 seconds (40-50 otherwise) and using 300MB of RAM (700-900 otherwise) at idle with Norton Antivirus (2008 I think) installed, and 2 sidebar gadgets running - the experience being identical to or better than a stock install in every other way (wireless was disabled though; and I cleared the system cache to get a "true reading" of how much RAM Windows was really using). And I don't think I can do any better in Windows 7, because some of those service tweaks that I had to manually apply in Vista come set by default in Windows 7. And there is still room for improvement, just not as much as there was in Vista.

Read what the post above this one has to say about tweaking services.

[hdood]

I see nothing wrong with using "services.msc" to disable services you don't use or will ever use, some of them hog significant amounts of memory. For instance, I don't plan on ever using remote management so I disabled it. If you want to consider that "Tweaking" then I don't see the problem with it. I've personally disabled about 12 services and my computer runs streamlined, a noticetable difference from factory settings. There's no use in running unnecessary services that most end users likely will never use.

Some services are safe to disable, but other services have uses that aren't necessarily obvious. You can end up hurting performance by disabling a service certain OS features use, without it being readily apparent from the description of the service. Or you can end up losing the feature completely. Most people should probably stay away from it.

As for the Remote* services, everything except RPC (which is a critical system component) won't automatically start unless you're actively using a feature that depends on them, meaning they do not use any resources at all. I realize it was just an example though. I also don't really buy your claim that they "hog significant amounts of memory" (unless there is something wrong with your system). A megabyte or two is not a significant amount. I don't buy that it runs "streamlined, a noticeable difference" either, unless it is a very, very old and slow system, because the idle services barely use any resources. The exception would be if there was something wrong with the system, causing the service to misbehave.

[hdood]

Services you know you won't use can be disabled - for example if you know you will never use a wireless connection, you can disable associated services. Similarly for Tablet PC components, and IPv6 support, and many more like that. But the assumption here is that you intimately know how services work.

Which you probably do not. Not just that, but both your examples of services actually never run in the first place unless you actually use tablet features or have a wireless card installed and enabled. If you do, then well, chances are you probably want them to start.

There is a fine line between useful tweaking and just silliness.

I'm surprised so many suggest disabling system restore. It's saved me from needing to reinstall multiple times in the past. I also use it as a simple way to backup the registry before making any edits...

Yeah, it's poor advice to be giving in general. I think I was the first one to bring it up in the thread, but I didn't mean to say that people should do it (most people shouldn't), it was just an example of a "tweak" that actually does have an impact by saving you disk space and a few seconds during installs. Of course, by doing so you actually lose a feature, but that is really the case for most legitimate "tweaks."

[kjx]

Which you probably do not. Not just that, but both your examples of services actually never run in the first place unless you actually use tablet features or have a wireless card installed and enabled. If you do, then well, chances are you probably want them to start.

There is a fine line between useful tweaking and just silliness.

My mistake with the Tablet PC service - if I remember right, it used to be set to Automatic by default in Windows Vista, and I made the statement based on that memory. I do have a wireless card installed (it's a laptop, which I use as a desktop - in the sense that I hardly ever take it around), and there was a time when I had no use for wireless networks (mostly because I used to be out of range of any useful wireless n/w) and I disabled the WLAN Auto Config service then.

There are a number of services which can be moved to delayed start like diagnostic policy service (you can alternatively just disable it if you are never going to use it), and you will see better startup times to a responsive desktop. The way I see it - the fewer services that load automatically - the faster the startup (assuming it's done right); the fewer services that startup totally (auto, delayed, and to some extent manual) - the lesser your memory usage. I used to be concerned with both aspects but I don't care a lot about memory usage anymore.

You can also improve performance by moving services that you see running most of the time but classified as manual into the delayed start category (at the expense of memory usage).