Turn off CCC/AMD FUEL/External Events Utility. My $.02

Greetings everyone. First post here, so correct me if I'm posting this in the wrong section.

For several months now, I've struggled with slow boot times on my PC (Phenom II 965 BE, 4 GB RAM, Radeon 5770, 1tb/80GB Mechanical HDD's).

I've tried several "computer optimization programs" like Advanced System Care, Tuneup utilities and some others, and to be honest, they DID have a slightly positive effect on performance, but I uninstalled them (just did, dunno why :P).

Today, I went into my services (msconfig) and disabled AMD FUEL, and AMD External services utility. I also disabled CCC from starting on bootup (I don't use CCC for OC'ing or anything else, so didn't need it). And VOILA, I checked in Event Viewer, and my boot times have decreased from 81577ms to 53970ms (still a tad slow, but 30 seconds is a HUGE boost [to me at least]).

I don't know why people recommend NOT turning off these services and CCC, but I assure you, you won't be missing out on anything if you don't frequently access Catalyst Control Centre. Just type MSconfig, and disables these services and stop CCC from auto startup, and if you don't see any increase in boot up performance, you can always turn them back on :)

So, that's it. Hope I helped someone :) Have a good day everyone, and thanks for reading the wall of text :)

P.S I play BF3 a lot, and several other games and my FPS are the SAME as they were before turning these things off, so if you're worrying about losing frames in games, this should quell those fears :)

Had you asked someone would likely have suggested to uninstall the display bloatware and only run the driver. This solves many problems we see here.

There are other tips here as well to Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

You may have crippled your system with the optimization suites you used which are not tolerated by Win7 which is already as light as an OS can be. If at all possible i would roll back using System Restore or System Image Recovery to before you used those, or start fresh following best practices to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 which steps are the same for retail.

gregrocker said:

Had you asked someone would likely have suggested to uninstall the display bloatware and only run the driver. This solves many problems we see here.

There are other tips here as well to Clean Up Factory Bloatware.

You may have crippled your system with the optimization suites you used which are not tolerated by Win7 which is already as light as an OS can be. If at all possible i would roll back using System Restore or System Image Recovery to before you used those, or start fresh following best practices to Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 which steps are the same for retail.

Interesting! So, these so-called "optimization programs" actually do more harm than good eh? Well, I'll be doing a clean install soon anyway (been a LOOONG time since my last clean install) and I'll make sure to stay away from these programs then. On that note, are registry cleaners also not recommended too? One would think they'd delete unused entries from the registry thus making it smaller and easier for the computer to sift through.

Well, I came to these very forums (and several others [via google]) asking whether or not to disable CCC and other AMD services, and the consensus seemed to me to be to leave them on, but I guess I just didn't read the right threads then :) Thanks for the great tips, have a great day :)

Registry Cleaners (other than the industry standard CCleaner) are even more harmful than optimization suites. Most are sales scams which have no genius at all like CCleaner.

Ah. Cool, thanks for your input gregrocker :) I guess it's time to lock this thread up now. Can I lock my own threads here?

Glad to help. You can mark it Solved at the top.

We do not lock threads as they can help many others for years via Google search, and they may have something to add.

I know this is a old thred but it is still the number 1 on google search for this topic. If anyone reads this question if for those that only use the driver and not CCC.exe. How do you configure all the setting normally found in the Catalyst control panel? like gama, brightness, color vibrant, dual monitor, game graphic setting like AA and and others?
Is there a application native to win7 that will do all this?

Thank you