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
Mythbusting: Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths
@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.
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!
I can tell you this much, this bulloney about shutting down literally every service to improve performance, is just that bulloney and a myth. I tried that once as I recall on on I think it was Windows XP, and messed up the OS, bad enough that I had to reinstall WindowsXP, and this was like back in 2004 when I did this.
All I have running to keep spyware and viruses at bay, is DEP for IE7, DEP for Vista, XD Technology(No Execute Disable), Live OneCare 2.5, and Spyware Blaster.
There is simply no need for a lot of these tweaks, having a ton of tweaks going, a boatload of registry cleaners on top of this. What does having a tone of registry cleaners do for people, nothing, absolutely nothing. Then they blame Microsoft, because they messed up their own systems.
Only registry cleaner I use is the one in TuneUp Utilities 2008.
What really improved system performance for me, was when I went to 8GB's of ram, and I'm considering getting a Q6600 or Q6700 cpu within a few months to see what performance boost I'll get from running a quad core on my motherboard.
@ WildEagle
Ain't that the truth my friend!!
Like I tell people, adjust the resources to meet the system and not the other way around...works everytime guaranteed!
what he says is a load of bullcookies.
I am building an AMD Quad core computer running XP. Currently a clean install, SP3, with no third party software installed. I have a an Intel Quad Core 6600 running Vista, loaded with stuff. For a test I booted both simultaneously. My Vista beat the XP by 20 seconds? Does this mean Vista is faster, or should I tweak the XP machine?
I am building an AMD Quad core computer running XP. Currently a clean install, SP3, with no third party software installed. I have a an Intel Quad Core 6600 running Vista, loaded with stuff. For a test I booted both simultaneously. My Vista beat the XP by 20 seconds? Does this mean Vista is faster, or should I tweak the XP machine?
Well what's wrong with Vista being faster?
I am building an AMD Quad core computer running XP. Currently a clean install, SP3, with no third party software installed. I have a an Intel Quad Core 6600 running Vista, loaded with stuff. For a test I booted both simultaneously. My Vista beat the XP by 20 seconds? Does this mean Vista is faster, or should I tweak the XP machine?
Well what's wrong with Vista being faster?
Absolutely Nothing :D
Well what's wrong with Vista being faster?
Absolutely Nothing :D
My thoughts exactly