I just see an overall strategy of trimming and tweaking where necessary to make a system quicker and safer if that doesn't imply breaking anything in the process. And the more one tweaks then the more one learns - even if it is sometimes painful.
W7 can be used out-of-the-box and I have no quibbles about it most of the time but it is perhaps a little harder to manage than XP for the tweak brigade (pincushion is an honorary member). :)
How long have you been with Win7, pincushion?
Many of us who were with Win7 through beta learned the hard way that the old XP tweaks are counterproductive and not well tolerated by Win7, which is already as lean as an OS can be.
To this day, the only clawback tweak I do is to edit Visual Effects of sliding, fading, animations and dragging intact on older hardware. This was habit in XP and the only habit I've carried over because it is barely noticeable visually (unless you accidentally uncheck Visual Style and everything suddenly looks like a file cabinet) but usually eliminates the only hangs I've seen in Win7 with more than 512mb RAM.
I've been using it for about 15 months and I'm quite happy with it but I still think some things can be trimmed or altered. My XP system was on its last legs but still struggles along - doesn't get connected to the Internet much these days, even for updates. In W7 I disable a few services and can't stand the indexing or search stuff. I never do any searching much anyway but Agent Ransack does it for me when I need it. I like to know what is connecting to the Internet and for what reason and I also like to know why my disk is thrashing about if it does this. So I tend to disable a lot of things that are software-related too. I must admit I've not felt the need to do any registry cleaning although I do use CCleaner after every browser session partly from the space issue but also from the safety aspect. I also am not a convert to Restore having used Ghost, Acronis and now Macrium to do the same thing but more reliably in my view.How long have you been with Win7, pincushion?
Many of us who were with Win7 through beta learned the hard way that the old XP tweaks are counterproductive and not well tolerated by Win7, which is already as lean as an OS can be.
To this day, the only clawback tweak I do is to edit Visual Effects of sliding, fading, animations and dragging intact on older hardware. This was habit in XP and the only habit I've carried over because it is barely noticeable visually (unless you accidentally uncheck Visual Style and everything suddenly looks like a file cabinet
You are missing one major point, and one that has been stressed for two years, but is still often missed. "Tweaks" aren't going to yield more performance in Windows 7. That's why the best tweaking advice is to leave it alone. Disabling services, altering OS settings, etc will yield no benefit.
If you separate out "customizing", then yes, there's plenty of room for that. But out of the box, aside from loading the latest drivers, Windows 7 will tune itself to run optimally. That's also why it doesn't need to be reloaded every so often.
You always have to remember that Windows 7 is a different animal than XP, and should be treated as such.
I will say that one thing you CAN get quicker boot performance from is disabling your unnecessary start up programs, it does sometimes save a few extra seconds or more.
Totally safe tweak no bad side effects.
Thanks, that's handy. But I also spend time inside My Computer so as to have access to different file types across folders. A "Recent history" in My Computer would save a lot a endless repetitive folder actions especially when they have several branches to find a commonly used file to launch from.
apogee07
And while we're at it has anyone a solution to enable the "input device" in Audacity 3.1 in W7. Works ok in XP. According to what I found scouring the net on this, apparently W7 does not support an "input device".
apogee07
I think you'll have to define 'benefit' since performance is not the sole issue.You are missing one major point, and one that has been stressed for two years, but is still often missed. "Tweaks" aren't going to yield more performance in Windows 7. That's why the best tweaking advice is to leave it alone. Disabling services, altering OS settings, etc will yield no benefit.
If you separate out "customizing", then yes, there's plenty of room for that. But out of the box, aside from loading the latest drivers, Windows 7 will tune itself to run optimally. That's also why it doesn't need to be reloaded every so often.
You always have to remember that Windows 7 is a different animal than XP, and should be treated as such.
I'll agree that most of the things I've done have been more customising than tweaks but if disabling some services gives me more memory for other things then that is what I'll do. I was down to about 35 before adding the ones I wanted to run.
One of the few things I have done is to remove Libraries from Explorer and dialogues but my major gripe is the one I can't do and that is remove the Recycle bin completely. Perhaps I am just more organised than most but I very rarely inadvertently delete something that I later regret and I have more than enough back-ups of any saved data. I would just like it to be made easier to remove all the things that you don't particularly need from whatever area e.g context menus. It makes things snappier and you are less likely to make mistakes by inadvertently choosing a wrong item from a menu. If it doesn't exist on the menu then you can't choose it.
Apart from that I do really like W7. :)
Last edited by pincushion; 16 Nov 2011 at 03:42. Reason: addition
Quote