Performance Tweaking Myths

I just read this article over on LifeHacker.com. It could be of some interest for you as well. Enjoy.

Mythbusting: Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths

 

[roy69]

Vista does not realy need tweeking.

 

[CreepinJesus]

[for the L2 tutorial] Ah ok, thanks. Hadn't seen that one before.

 

[johngalt]

yeah, most of this already makes sense to me, except i do disagree with a couple:

1: clearing the prefetch folder does shorten boot time (more specifically deleting the NTOSBOOT.......pf file does on my machine) but you end up with a longer logon time because your programs load at logon, not during boot. So it takes the same time, possibly longer.

2: I would have thought disabling pointless services when ur pc is limited to a small amount of ram would help your pc from paging more stuff everytime you run an app that needs a lot of memory.

Actually, it will lengthen your boot time for a couple of instances only - within 2-3 reboots the pre-fetch folder is fully populated.

Now, those that automatically clear the pre-fetch on shutdown . reboot are the true idiots - sure, as fieseler said, you get shorter boot times - but then you wait for an interminable period while apps load after you log on. Of course this symptom is most noticeable to those who do *not* automatically log on.

anyone else do the tweak to make vista use all 4mb of ur l2 cache? i get an increase in my performance score so that one must make a diff

That tweak only provides performance boosts *if* your system is not correctly recognizing it in the first place- if it is then forcing it to use the L2 cache when it is already set to use it is, well, useless.

 

[Everlong]

This is very interesting.

Think I'll cut back on cleaning up my PC as much as I do now.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

@Everlong18, cool avatar!












Later Ted

 

[Everlong]

Thanks

 

[rtt_77388]

Vista does not realy need tweeking.

Some habits die hard. From DOS to Thru Windows Me, you could really optimize a system. Now with Vista and a bucket load of resources Roy is probibly right.

I do clean my registry, do disk cleanup, virus scans and defrags. Outside of just visual preference, I have not tweaked much this build. Runs great.....

 

[TheShadow]

Well, I've been tweaking and tuning since the DOS 2.0 days and I've always managed to squeeze a little more performance out of every system I've ever worked on.
(all 1000+ of them)

Vista is a dog, a real Bow Wow, a MUTT that needs all the tweaking and tuning that a tech can stand to do.
Two to three minutes to just boot up is rediculous for a system advertised to be the very latest and greatest State of the Art OS ever.

Tell a little old lady who just upgraded from a Windows 98/SE machine to a new Vista PC, that she'll have to wait over two minutes, maybe three, for her new PC to boot up and she'll 'make your day'.

I have to do everything I can to keep that little ol' lady from throwing her new Vista PC (and me) right out in the street!

I tweak and tune and shut down 22 to 24 Services and finally get Vista to run like a real computer. It ain't easy, but it's doable.

It's one thing to sit at home futzing with your own PC and another thing all together to be responsible for hundreds of PC's in hundreds of homes.

Cheers Mates!
Shadow

 

[dmex]

Vista does not realy need tweeking.

Some habits die hard. From DOS to Thru Windows Me, you could really optimize a system. Now with Vista and a bucket load of resources Roy is probibly right.

I do clean my registry, do disk cleanup, virus scans and defrags. Outside of just visual preference, I have not tweaked much this build. Runs great.....

Im agreing with Roy, I only turn off the Secure Desktop used by UAC (screen darkening) and also turn off offline files...I use the STR sandby (S3) shutdown and it boots up really fast...If I was using XP I usually have to tweak services and quite a few settings to make it run properly or use things properly but I have found Vista runs and does better with most settings left on default.

It took about 3 months of testing a fair few Vista installs to realise it actually really does do better just changing a few things but I guess it depends on what habits you have setting the OS up

 

[RubberDuck]

Thx Guys

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello RubberDuck, welcome to Vista forums!











Later Ted

 

[NormCameron]

I read the above article and agree it makes sense. However, I followed the suggestions in Brinks Tutorial on improving Vista Performance and I can assure you that something there made a tremendous difference to the way my Quad Core operates. No more long delays in loading Vista and the 2 minute "freeze" has gone. The biggest change seemed to occur when I used MS Config to modify the "Number of processors" drop-down on the Boot tab and set the L2 cache size.

 

[johngalt]

That change is not covered in the article....

In fact, most of the tutorials that are here have no relation to the 30 myths in the articles.

 

[dmex]

One myth I should mention is the TCP connection limit patch...

In XP-SP2 and later... Microsoft changed the HALF-OPEN TCP connection limit to 15 however this does nothing to decrease download speed yet most people use the TCP patch to adjust the HALF-OPEN limit when NOTHING uses Half-Open TCP connections

 

[NormCameron]

@johngalt, I re-read the article and apologise for my error, however I still maintain that one of those two "tweaks" made a dramatic improvement in boot times and got rid of the "freeze" on startup

 

[johngalt]

I wasn't arguing that - but this thread is about performance *myths* - the tutorials here, for the most part, do *not* cover those myths - hence, you *should* see performance boosts, as a myth is the only thing that *won't* give you a boost.

 

[NormCameron]

@johngalt,
The article specifically refers to the quad-core tweak as a myth and says it doesn't work. This would mean the improvement occurred because of the L2 tweak only, however I am not sure this would have much of an impact on boot-up?

 

[johngalt]

Ahhh - I had forgotten that was one of the listed tweaks. Yeah, I am not sure but too many people are seeing noticeable improvements - hwoever, it can just as easily be argued that if you repeatedly boot a machine 3 times in a row you move all *boot time* startup items to the front of hte prefetch queue, thereby making them load faster and faster each time....

I am not saying this is the case, just say that this could be argued.

however, it is *very* interesting to note that in M$'s own document Download details: Windows Vista® Performance and Tuning they advocate

Disable Background Programs or Services
If you don’t want to uninstall a program or service completely, you can prevent the program or service from starting with Windows.

followed by this quotation:

Disable Unwanted Services
A service is a program designed to run in the background and provide particular services to the programs on a computer. While this sounds a lot like a regular program that runs in the background, there are a couple of important differences:
· Services can log onto the computer with specific credentials. This means that a service can run even if a user does not log on.
· Services may have dependencies. Services can be set so that other services must load first in order for a service to start.
These distinctions are important to understand when you set off to locate and disable unused services. Before you turn a service on or off, you must understand what that service does and whether other services depend on it to load. It is not a purpose of this guide to detail every service available on a computer running Windows Vista. However, it can give you some tips for determining if a service is a good candidate to disable and show you how to disable a service.

 

[NormCameron]

@johngalt, THank you for your response. I read the Microsoft article with interest, but note that many, if not all of their improvement tecniques are well docemented elsewhere and many of these I had previously implimented. This problem with slooow startup and mysterious hanging only occurred after I upgraded my system to Ultimate (by doing a clean install) and the difficulty could have been to do with an improper install. However it was resolved, my system now performs quite well and I am gratefull to you, brinks, and all others at this forum who have taken the time and effort to produce guides and respond to questions. Thanks again.

 

[Chappy]

I've been trying to kill some of those myths for YEARS now...

I've NEVER recommended registry cleaners, I always tried to point out the inherent dangers and the absolute BUNK that they'll make your system faster...especially to newer users. They're the ones most likely to damage their systems because they can't recognize an obvious false positive key when they see one, mainly because they know next to nothing about the registry structure. In many cases this is the first time they even hear about the Registry and now they're trying to edit it....ouch! Orphaned keys are not accessed so they do no harm and 500 useless keys add up to maybe 1MB space so ther are Zero savings with these smoke & mirror products.

Then the always pervasive "Services Tweaks"...one of my personal peeves. I've seen more people end up with "Mysterious" problems after trying these tweaks and then they yell and scream about how awful Microsoft is and they should be prosecuted for such junk OS's. 99% of the time it's the users own actions that cause their problems and these Services tweaks are a very big part of this. We tested this for over 8 months on 15 machines at my main site and found that the Maximum RAM savings was less than 40MB's and the issues caused by them (even the so-called "Safe" settings) caused 39% more "unknown" errors on clean, normal use machines (XP SP1) than on the non-tweaked systems. All these systems had the same programs installed, the same system settings, the same security s'ware installed, and driver and similar errors were omitted from the results.
In all there are way more problems caused by these tweaks than there are savings to be found. I turn a few services from Auto to Manual..ones like Tablet PC since I don'thave one, Parental Controls...I'm a bachelor living alone with grown kids, Smart Card removal Policy...don't need that one...and 1 or 2 others like that. All the rest should be left alone or changed at your own peril.

I've also tried to explain to people who are furious at MS about the limit of Half open connections limit, that this does not affect their d'loads of their torrents, or any other download. It's the P2P users who are most susceptible to this myth and there are many "cracked" TCP/IP.dll files to be found out there. Problem is that the 64bit version will break your TCP/IP stack and make your machine UNBOOTABLE because it fails to verify as a proper system file!!! Unfortunately, the 64bit users find out about this the hard way and end up having to reinstall and lose their data because of it, since they do not back up the original properly or know how to restore it to an unbootable machine. It's done through the Repair console (basically DOS command) and they lack the knowledge to do this, so...goodbye data.

Some tweaks are more difficult to figure out that they're useless. I must admit I changed the setting to try and get both processors used on bootup, this one sounded logical. But after reading a post by Mark Russinovich a while back I removed that tweak too.

I think the overall main factor to be learned from this is....TWEAKS are usually not needed, and can in fact harm your system!! Entire software industries have been built around peoples unwarranted beliefs that the MS OS is heavily burdened with resource hogging services, and the Registry bloats and bogs a system down because of poorly written Uninstallers and needs serious repair because of this....all incorrect! But many businesses make serious money from peoples lack of knowledge on how the OS truly works, and their oft' times maniacal beliefs in system tweakers. I've seen people with over 6 different AntiSpyware apps installed, 3 or more registry cleaners...because one has different features than the other has, applied umpteen hundred tweaks they've read about (without researching any of course), and awear their systems run like a "3 Day old Gazelle" now! Of course thats all in their minds because they WANT to believe it's true, but for some unknown reason (it's Microsoft's fault!!!), they need to reinstall every 3 months or so...hmmm...coincidence?? Me thinx not



EDIT - I guess it's not ALL bad... after all, without allot of these so-called "tweaks", we'd have a heck of allot less work to do on our fave Tech help forums, right guy's-N-gals!