How can i slim down my Windows 7? Any kind of program

[gregrocker]

Because this a forum about Windows 7; I would like to give my openion. Windows 7 is GREAT.

Feather-light, instantaneous, intuitive - one of the greatest achievements in tech.

 

[Leopard]

This is a very rude post, and very inconsiderate. I am a Mac user, and I am very capable with technology.

This is a Windows forum.. and so long as Steve Jobs continues the marketing strategy of limiting use of OS-X (which is nothing more than a superficial proprietary layer over freeware) to hardware that retails for more than 3 times what it's worth in any windows based system, while hypocritically making it possible for a trained monkey to set up Windows on a Mac, I will rip on MACs and their targeted users at every opportunity as I see fit..
If you happen to be one of the very small minority of MAC users who knows how to use single sign on mode and isn't afraid of the terminal.. more power to you ..and if you are truly very capable with technology, you would know the truth of my statement as you are not the kind of person the typical MACs is marketed towards in most recent mac advertisements

Mac OS X is not just a proprietary layer over freeware.
Mach, XNU, Carbon, Cocoa, IEEE 1394, Aqua, Finder, CUPS, Quartz, Quartz Extreme, Mail, iTunes, Safari, iMovie, iWeb, iPhoto, Garageband, XCode, Expose, FileVault, Preview, AppleScript.
It's not a proprietary layer over freeware. It's an entire proprietary desktop environment and API over a hybrid BSD/Mach/XNU kernel taken from BSD, Steve Jobs' NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP project, and Apple's own offerings, open-sourced in Darwin.
Microsoft is no Angel either. Their first OS was Q-DOS bought and re-branded.

Furthermore, let's leave out the BS comments that a Mac "just works". 99.9% of a computer's stability comes from the person using it. The hardware is the same, so hardware failures are at an equal likelihood on both.

Which is why I say Macs are designed to be used by people who shouldn't be trusted to program a TV. The average Macbook is set up for automatic login..the average user usually immediately forgets the password and is locked out of changing any settings that could affect it's OS-X crippled performance.. until a tech at an AppleStore unlocks it for them using the biggest security flaw in any system design.

This isn't true. No one I know using Mac OS X has forgotten their password. Certainly I haven't. I've only forgot one password in my life, and it was definitely not an OS password. It was actually Steam, which I never use anyway. Still, Steam support reset my password and security question without much fuss. Ironically, I still haven't used Steam yet (Though I might start playing America's Army 3 soon on it).

mount -uw /    
 rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone    
 shutdown -h now

This is incorrect.

mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdX /mac
cd /mac/var/db/
rm -f .AppleSetupDone
shutdown -h now

X being replaced with the correct number found by running

fdisk -l

-

To be honest, I was hoping this forum didn't have so many fanboys like MacRumors or LinuxQuestions. Apparently not.

 

[Leopard]

Because this a forum about Windows 7; I would like to give my openion. Windows 7 is GREAT.

Feather-light, instantaneous, intuitive - one of the greatest achievements in tech.

Agreed.

Well actually I think THE greatest achievement in tech was the advent of the x86.

I'm not a fanboy of anything. I use Linux, Windows 7 and Mac OS X in a tri-boot scenario with rEFIt.

 

[spyknee]

jeez,

Who the bleep cares about Mac's. The threader was asking about W7 and getting best game performance.
I'd have to say that this thread has attention defficet disorder. LOL

 

[stormy13]

 

[Leopard]

jeez,

Who the bleep cares about Mac's. The threader was asking about W7 and getting best game performance.
I'd have to say that this thread has attention defficet disorder. LOL

I do, its the machine from which I am typing this reply.

View attachment 104167

I laughed so hard.

 

[karlsnooks]

To the thread starter:

You be sure to try all the tweaks you find out there and to try all of the tweaker programs. Be sure at the same time to shoot yourself in the foot.

Use Win 7's DiskCleanup and CCleaner and quit right there.

 

[pparks1]

It just so happens that I got one of my test machines back from my lab today at work and I needed to proceed with a clean install of Windows 7 onto the machine. I wanted to get a real good look at how Windows 7 comes right out of the gate without the end user polluting the environment.

I installed Win7 64-bit Ultimate edition onto my test box at work. The box consists of an Asus P5QL-Pro mobo, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00ghz, 8GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 RAM, an EVGA 8600GT and a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 7,200RPM hard drive.

With a full install of Windows and the first reboot, my Windows 7 box was running 32 processes, and was consuming 10% of my physical memory. The total RAM was 8191, Cached was 845, Available was 7244 and Free was 6322. So, that comes out to less than 1GB of RAM being used.

My boot time breakdown is 25.6 seconds from power button press to "Starting Windows". From there, it's 19 seconds to the logon screen. So, my total time from power button press to logon is between 44.0 and 44.9 seconds over 5 tests. The time to power off said box is between 7.8 and 8.5 seconds.

The hard drive space used was 22,622,601,216 bytes. However, the hiberfil.sys file was 6,290,772KB and the pagefile.sys by default was 8,387,696KB. So, by eliminating the hiberfil.sys file (powercfg -h off), I dropped to 16,178,061,312. And if I turned off the pagefile (which I don't actually recommend), it dropped to 7,594,749,952.

So, as you can see...Windows 7 by itself is pretty lightweight. It's not until you start adding apps, and other garbage that the # of processes skyrockets and the amount of disk space dwindles.

 

[karlsnooks]

Measuring boot and shutdown times

BOOT AND SHUTDOWN PERFORMANCE​

How to use Event Viewer to view your Boot and Shutdown Performance

WIN key | type EVENTVWR.MSC | ENTER key

First wait for the Event Viewer to be populated-watch the Summary of Administrative Events section.

Now, using the left-hand pane tunnel down as follows:
Applications and services logs | Microsoft | Windows | Diagnostics-Performance | Operational

Right-click on Operational.

In the top-section of the middle pane, various events are listed.

Click on EventID to sort the events from smallest to largest.

EventID 100 is for Boot Performance.
EventID 200 is for Shutdown Performance

 

[spyknee]

It would appear that the threader was chased off.

If you did not want to help him, you should have not posted. Nay saying and bullying your negative view points serves no purpose.

If this forum is not to illuminate Windows 7 and the hardware its on, then its useless.

Process reduction is not tweaking, its going thru the house and turning off the light bulb in an unused room.
The tips I offered were tweaks, and they work great. So do not tell me I can not improve my Windows experience, I have.

 

[Maxxwire]

Process reduction is not tweaking, its going thru the house and turning off the light bulb in an unused room.

When I went through the 164 services on my Win 7 computer I actually found 12 'manual' processes that were running at the time which I will never have a use for. Each of these processes was using system resources to run I didn't just turn them off I completely removed the 'light bulb' by disabling their services and thus preventing them from ever unnecessarily consuming vital system resources Win 7 again in the future.

Whether this procedure is called a 'tweak' or not is a matter of semantics, but the result is the same and is something that anyone who wants to obtain an enhanced level of performance by reducing the needless and wasteful consumption of system resources in Win 7 should consider.

~Maxx~
.

 

[Lordbob75]

Despite arguments on either side, Windows 7 really does not NEED any (much) tweaking.

You CAN tweak it, absolutely. In the end, the amount of time saved by turning those features off (such as unnecessary services) is not huge.

This thread turned into multiple arguments, so I posting this as my opinion, and as (what I see) the general consensus of the thread.

Tweaking/slimming Windows 7 down is perfectly possible, but will not save you minutes, only seconds (on most computers)

~Lordbob

 

[Maxxwire]

Tweaking/slimming Windows 7 down is perfectly possible, but will not save you minutes, only seconds (on most computers)~Lordbob

In my experience the amount of noticeable improvement depends heavily on the build quality of the computer involved in that a specific set of changes to my desktop computer will yield a much less dramatic improvement than same set of improvements will on my modestly equipped laptop which has 1/3 the desktop's Passmark Benchtest score.

~Maxx~
.

 

[Lordbob75]

Tweaking/slimming Windows 7 down is perfectly possible, but will not save you minutes, only seconds (on most computers)~Lordbob

In my experience the amount of noticeable improvement depends heavily on the build quality of the computer involved in that a specific set of changes to my desktop computer will yield a much less dramatic improvement than same set of improvements will on my modestly equipped laptop which has 1/3 the desktop's Passmark Benchtest score.

~Maxx~
.

That is why I said (most computers)

~Lordbob

 

[Maxxwire]

Yes, most computers being used today which have a less than State of the Art build quality and would benefit substantially from tweaking to reduce the wasteful use of precious system resources.

~Maxx~
.

 

[madtownidiot]

That's the main focus of my work.. making less than state of the art technology work with a state of the art operating system despite the industry's best efforts to make said technology prematurely obsolete, and I'm getting better at it every day.

 

[pparks1]

I don't find that on any reasonable PC that Windows 7 has run slow. But I'm probably lucky that i don't run on any really ancient hardware.

 

[Maxxwire]

That's the main focus of my work.. making less than state of the art technology work with a state of the art operating system despite the industry's best efforts to make said technology prematurely obsolete, and I'm getting better at it every day.

Keep persuing your noble calling!

~Maxx~
.

 

[Lordbob75]

Yes, most computers being used today which have a less than State of the Art build quality and would benefit substantially from tweaking to reduce the wasteful use of precious system resources.

~Maxx~
.

Now you are changing what I said.

That is absolutely not what I meant. I said that MOST computers would NOT see a huge benefit. Maybe a few seconds at most, but not anything over a minute.
There are probably excepts to this, but in general there is not going to be a 30 second decrease in boot up time by disabling 15 services you don't actually use.

I will not deny that tweaking would have an effect.
I AM denying that it will "benefit substantially from tweaking to reduce the wasteful use of precious system resources"

Please do not twist my words.

~Lordbob

 

[madtownidiot]

Oldest machine I have successfully installed windows 7 on and made fully functional so far is a dell dimension 2200 that shipped in 2002 with all of 128 MB of RAM, a 20GB HDD and a 1.4Ghz P4. I gave it the maximum memory upgrade (512 MB) and the biggest IDE HDD I could find, and it actually works.. slow as a dog for anything more cpu intense than browsing facebook while listening to music.. but still better than it ever ran in XP.. and will probably run forever if it's kept clean.

So.. yes there is a good reason to learn how to tweak windows 7.. if only to be able to flip the middle finger at all those a****** manufacturers who stop supporting their products 30 seconds after the warranty expires.. just so you'll have no choice but to buy another machine that will be prematurely obsolete