How To Make Windows 7 Faster and Responsive by 2X

I've read about this before and the consensus that I came to was that it's bunk. Gut feel might say one thing, but stopwatches and monitoring processes, memory usage and the like often tell a slightly different story.

This is great for 'cleaning' temps. I was amazed at how much more it found than CCleaner and without all the junk sitting in those files, computer does actually run a wee bit faster

TFC by Old Timer TFC - Temp File Cleaner by OldTimer - Geeks to Go! and save it to your desktop.
Save any unsaved work. TFC will close ALL open programs including your browser!
Double-click on TFC.exe to run it. If you are using Vista/Windows 7 right-click on the file and choose Run As Administrator.

Click the Start button to begin the cleaning process and let it run uninterrupted to completion.
Important! If TFC prompts you to reboot, please do so immediately. If not prompted, manually reboot the machine anyway to ensure a complete clean.

TFC (Temp File Cleaner) will clear out all temp folders for all user accounts (temp, IE temp, java, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari), including Administrator, All Users, LocalService, NetworkService, and any other accounts in the user folder. It also cleans out the %systemroot%\temp folder and checks for .tmp files in the %systemdrive% root folder, %systemroot%, and the system32 folder (both 32bit and 64bit on 64bit OSs). It shows the amount removed for each location found (in bytes) and the total removed (in MB). Before running, it will stop Explorer and all other running apps. When finished, if a reboot is required the user must reboot to finish clearing any in-use temp files.

TFC only cleans temp folders. TFC will not clean URL history, prefetch, or cookies. Depending on how often someone cleans their temp folders, their system hardware, and how many accounts are present, it can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more. TFC will completely clear all temp files where other temp file cleaners may fail. TFC requires a reboot immediately after running. Be sure to save any unsaved work before running TFC.

Good tip, thanks, Jacee.

I think I see not right (literal translation from German). Someone is pulling out leg.

riala said:

Ok! not so nice!

No worries Riala. I am glad you posted it. I had not seen that tweak before and it gave all of us a chance to validate/invalidate it with more info. It seems there is not much info on this tweak, but it is ok. No worries.

+1 for the tweak being useful only in (very) limited scenarios. Increasing paged pool memory does increase the size of the kernel paged pool memory pool, which is useful as it stores information about PTEs created for disk access, the registry, sections for memory mapped files, etc. Increasing this value means that the paged pool size is larger, so on a non-busy system it will take longer for these pages to be written out of RAM and to the paging file on disk (just because something is in paged pool doesn't mean it's automatically paged to disk - this only happens if RAM is needed for other apps that paged pool currently consumes).

So, if you have a very underutilized system (check email, browse the web, open *small* documents, etc.) this *might* help you depending on the drivers you have installed, the apps you run and how large the data in those applications are, etc. However, if you game, open large applications or open large numbers of files at any one time, this sort of tweak is actually going to be a *bad* thing in the long term (the busier your system gets, the worse performance will be when paging occurs as there will be more data to page), especially if you're still using 32bit Windows; the default and the potential max size of kernel paged pool on x86 is much smaller (XP, 470MB; 2003, 650MB; Vista/7, sized at 75% of RAM by default up to 2GB, whichever is smaller) than the default size on x64 (XP/2003, 400KB/MB of RAM up to 128GB; Vista/Win7, sized at 75% of RAM by default up to 128GB, whichever is smaller)- another area where switching to x64 will benefit you.

Also, given that on Vista and newer the kernel pools (both paged and nonpaged) are dynamic (on x86 as well as x64), a tweak like this is almost useless at this point simply for that fact - especially in Windows 7, Windows already tries to make the size of the pools the correct size for load, as well as making sure that as much other oft-used data is precached as well. My guess is that folks using XP or 2003, or using x86 Vista or Windows 7 would *maybe* see something useful from this, but that would be a big maybe (and you'd have to show me data to back it up, not just the placebo "it feels faster now!" effect.

Digerati said:

solarmystic said:

Placebo effect perhaps?

I think that is a safe assumption for ALL so called performance tweaks.

Here's another interesting read from Ed Bott, Windows Tweaking and optimizations: myths and reality.

Good read. Thanks for the link.

Layback Bear said:

Well I have read all this, some I understand and some I don't. IMHO there is a simple way of handling it. Use Windows 7 64 bit with at least 4 gigs of good ram. Then just let Windows manage the ram. Windows 7 seem to do it quiet well.

+1 Hear! Hear! Well said.