Optimize Windows 7

You're most welcome hcour. I'm happy to hear that it was able to help. :)

You're most welcome rkgnarnaul. :)

I think Swarfega did actually raise some valid questions that in some cases I already noticed were covered, and in other cases perhaps could have been highlighted a little more, such as the fact that although auto-login has a security risk, making sure you have a password enabled before/after setting the auto-login is a good measure to protect on the network. It can then be required to enter password after sleep/screensaver (which I'm not sure if it defeats the object - depends on screensaver/sleep time settings I guess). You did however mention the password and network issue in a post further down in the thread on the auto-login tutorial which prompted me to make sure I put one straight back on. I guess once you start working down the list and improving reboot time you ask yourself why you have a password until you think about networking and also later discover the auto-login feature.

I'm very much not sure about the write-caching myself. Although you did put sufficient warnings covering external disk drives, I feel that perhaps an internal disk-drive is just as risky in the case of a power-cut. I'm not fully sure how what the practicalities are of a power failure causing data loss and the risk factor between write caching on and off, so although I've left it on for now (default setting) I'm tempted to turn it on in my quest for performance and efficiency. I'm also doing video editing and on the one hand I want the best possible disk write speeds for creating render preview files etc. but on the other hand losing data is not something I wish to risk. Having said that certain contingencies can be (and are) in place so that during any particular transfer of data there is always a back-up. I wonder if the performance increase will be noticeable or if it is for anyone else?

Thanks for the list Shawn, it's been a great one to work down even when I thought I had already optimised things.

I have Windows remember my folders, is this something that will also slow things down (even when there aren't any folders left open on shut-down?)

Finally now I've done everything I think I'm going to reboot and see if my reported reboot time has improved. I'm almost certain that it will! :)

Thaliur said:

andreasandrews said:

I'm very much not sure about the write-caching myself. Although you did put sufficient warnings covering external disk drives, I feel that perhaps an internal disk-drive is just as risky in the case of a power-cut.

That is true, at a power outage, both types of drives are equally threatened. It is far less likely to suddenly remove an internal drive by accident, though, which can easily happen with a USB disk.

A false sense of security when using internal drives? I don't know, as I'm not sure how the difference between a power-cut during a data transfer with write caching on compares to without. It's not something I particularly want to test with my hard-drives :P

My reboot time came to 159 secs, which isn't quite as fast as I had expected although my computer isn't the fastest I'm considering over-clocking this AMD quad core Bulldozer.. perhaps something to talk about on another thread. Hopefully I'll find one because I'm not sure where to start :P

#2: Where do I find the latest BIOS revision for my motherboard?
#3: If I might have less than enough RAM for the 64-bit edition of Windows 7, should I have opted to clean-install to the 32-bit edition instead?

Hello HoneycombAG,

Q1) I can't find the driver download page for that specific motherboard in your specs at the MSI website.

Q2) 2 GB of RAM meets the bare minimum requirements of 64-bit Windows 7, so you could go either way. Personally with that amount, you may see better performance with 32-bit Windows 7.

Hope this helps some,
Shawn

Even if my memory usage gets out of control on this system, how is it possible to keep usage under control?

This machine used to have 4GB installed, up until a RAM slot broke transferring the motherboard to a different case.