Windows 7: Any advice to improve windows 7 performance?

I have a horribly outdated motherboard, so upgrading the CPU isn't an option, and upgrading the RAM would be a waste of money. So what can I change through software to make it a little more responsive? I was using build 7077 x86, 7100 x64 seems faster in some places, but slower in others. with just firefox and media player open I am using around 30% CPU and 1.2gb of memory. I notice that when I'm watching HD video online it stutters like it never did in XP, I have a very large music library, and when windows media player updates information it will sometimes hang for as long as 10 seconds. and scrolling through it is kind of slow. It boots up fast though, 89 seconds. and it seems like once a program gets started it works faster than before, but it takes so long for things to load in the first place.



Hey, so I just realized I think almost all my problems are from windows media player searching for files, it does it way too often, and uses 100% of the CPU when it does it, is there a way to make it stop unless I add more music and want it to? it almost always has "updating media library" or "Updating media info" in the lower righthand corner.

Hello TheProphet, and welcome to Seven Forums.

You can go through this list of items for Vista to see how much they can help improve your performance in Windows 7.

Speed Up the Performance of Vista - Vista Forums

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for the advice. I ended up just switching to WinAmp to fix the WMP problem. But I will try out those vista tweaks and see how well that helps.

I'm happy to hear that you got the WMP problem sorted. Thank you for posting back on how you sorted it.

Id certainly disable indexing. Another thing you could do would be to replace the hard drive. Since its only 160gb Im guessing its quite slow as well. You might want to look at one with a 32mb cache.

Id recommend against touching superfech in Windows 7 as listed on the vista forums as they have tightened its integration into the OS further so theres no telling what side effects it might have.

i thought the indexing of hdd's sped up the drive's performance? what am i missing?

Hello Stevae,

The index was designed to help speed up search results by having it search through a index of locations instead of the entire hard drive. There have been cases of it causing the hard drive to run more often than normal while the index is updating itself.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I think with the next build I will be switching to 32 bit. it seems like 64 just uses more resources, and causes more compatibility problems. My motherboard only supports 4gb of RAM, and I hardly use any 64 bit software. So it's kind of a waste. I will definitely get 64 when I build my next rig and buy the final version though. I've heard people are using like 8-16gb of RAM in some new builds, is this even necessary? Since I've been broke for a while I haven't been paying very close attention to cutting edge hardware like I used to, but I can't really think of a way I could be using more than 4gb unless it was for video editing or something. If I had a high end computer, like say a quad core CPU, GTX 280, and a fast 1tb hdd would I see a big difference in my games between 4gb and 8gb of RAM?

TheProphet,

It really depends on your needs and how you have running at once, but usually 4 GB is enough for most people. I would concentrate on the speed of the RAM instead of how much you have, with 2 GB or more, to get the most performance from them.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

hi guys,

8gig ram will surely improve performance
especially games such as 8gig games