10 Windows speed tips that DON'T work.

vpwin7 said:

I usually just go into my services and features, and disable any that I will not be using. I would have to say boot up performance is definitely increased, but duration after the computer has loaded seems minimally affected.

I experimented extensively with services and I found maybe a second's difference in boot time with some of the services disabled as opposed to their stock manual setting. I did leave a few disabled for services that I do not use and for security reasons (such as remote management). Windows 7 manages services very, very well - not at all like XP or even Vista. Win 7 loads services as it needs them and unloads them if they are not needed. That is why you didn't see a difference in performance after the initial loading of Windows.

And as far as unloading DLLs, I believe it is true that they are kept loaded even after the program closes, I'm pretty sure of it. Although I would not suspect such a thing to be a problem unless the computer had little RAM. I was actually taught in when coding to unload DLLs after use, but this was mostly used to prevent memory leaks, and often only loaded DLLs that were rarely used in operations of the program.

The old rules that we used for memory management in XP do not apply to Win 7. It is a brand new game. The Win 7 engineers got memory management right. Win 7 keeps priority items in RAM and low priority items either get removed or written to the pagefile, including dll's. There is no third party app, no tweak you can do to improve memory management in Win 7. This is not to say that some app may not come along down the road; but it is certainly not here yet. For best permance, leave Win 7 to manage memory and services on its own.

In the "good old" days of expensive RAM and HDD space there were tweaks to minimize the use of both that were somewhat effective. But any performance boost even those tweaks might have offered were debatable.

Eliminating any unneeded services was often effective in conserving memory usage, so-so on CPU usage. Black Viper's Guides were a very good guide in that respect.

But with lower memory and HDD prices the benefit of the so-called performance tweak is dubious. Especially the "Always Unload DLLs". With the lower memory costs - load those DLLS and keep them loaded, IMO!

The most effective performance tweak available has always been, and remains so, is to turn off any eye-candy you can live without (IMO).

That said, with todays hardware (memory, CPU and HDD) costs the "secret" registry and service tweaks can be far more problematic than they are worth. For instance, the success of adding a software app or a new piece of hardware at some future date may depend on a registry setting or a service that was altered/disabled long ago and forgotten.

It is nice to, finally, have affordable machines that can run Windows as installed "out of the box" without fighting for every processor cycle and I/O read/write.

The "good old" days of DOS with memory expansion cards and drivers were NOT that good....

Muad Dib said:

In the "good old" days of expensive RAM and HDD space there were tweaks to minimize the use of both that were somewhat effective. But any performance boost even those tweaks might have offered were debatable.

Eliminating any unneeded services was often effective in conserving memory usage, so-so on CPU usage. Black Viper's Guides were a very good guide in that respect.

But with lower memory and HDD prices the benefit of the so-called performance tweak is dubious. Especially the "Always Unload DLLs". With the lower memory costs - load those DLLS and keep them loaded, IMO!

The most effective performance tweak available has always been, and remains so, is to turn off any eye-candy you can live without (IMO).

That said, with todays hardware (memory, CPU and HDD) costs the "secret" registry and service tweaks can be far more problematic than they are worth. For instance, the success of adding a software app or a new piece of hardware at some future date may depend on a registry setting or a service that was altered/disabled long ago and forgotten.

It is nice to, finally, have affordable machines that can run Windows as installed "out of the box" without fighting for every processor cycle and I/O read/write.

The "good old" days of DOS with memory expansion cards and drivers were NOT that good....

Well said. +1

unifex said:

Well, I do agree that Windows 7 is much better and faster than previous OS versions. It is also clear that with enough memory and hard drive space one does not need most of the so-called "performance tweaks". And I would definitely agree that wholesale removal of registry entries by those so-called 'tune-up' utilities and even CCleaner is not a good idea.

Still, I find that Windows Installer can use a lot of improvement. From time to time I try a new app and more often than not end up uninstalling it. Almost never the stock uninstaller removes all traces of the app. Registry entries, folders and files in various system and/or user directories are routinely left behind. So, if you do this - install and uninstall apps - often, then you see ever growing number of such left-overs. Most likely they do not affect your PC's performance by themselves. But, any kind of scan - anti-virus, malware, defragmentation, even disk clean-up - gets slower, since there are more files to go through. Search produces more irrelevant results. Finally, for some people - such as myself - it's simply too annoying to have to keep this useless stuff.

You can use Revo uninstaller; It does a pretty good job of getting rid of all traces of a program.

Same can be said regarding Windows Services. Can anyone explain to me, why would the out-of-the-box Windows enable Tablet services on my desktop? Do I really need services for smart cards and bluetooth devices if I don't have any? Is it too paranoid to consider remote registry and remote desktop to be a security risk, let alone the fact that I would never use them anyways?

Remember that Windows 7 OS is designed to fit users' needs worldwide. Like you you, I don't use Bluetooth, smart cards, or Tablet. However, there are a lot of folks that do. Win 7 is designed to make it easy for them to "plug and play". I, too, disabled these - not that they hurt anything.

I also disabled remote registry and remote desktop for security reasons. I do realize that Win 7 Ultimate was developed for the business world where the IT folks use these tools through their business LAN's.

The caveat to disabling services is that many are interdependent. You have have to carefully look at dependencies to make sure that disabling a particular service does not affect another service that you need.

I would probably agree that "straightening out" the OS along these lines has nothing to do with performance. But it would be very nice if there were some app to help me out with it. Unfortunately I have yet to see such an app, and thus I have to concur with my fellow posters in this thread - most of the 'tune-up' utilities are a waste of time and money at best, some of them would even make you more trouble.

We agree.

Aphelion said:

manhunter2826 said:

Interesting read -- and I simply think Windows 7 needs very little tweaking, out of the box IMO . Thanks JMH.

Depends on what you're doing, if it's real-time operations Windows 7 needs plenty of tweaks. Don't know about the 10 tweaks mentioned here but I have a (required) list that I perform on machines built for professional audio recording.

So far the all-time champ for this type of work is Windows XP, low overhead and reliable.

Ap

Post your list please.