How to Speed up Windows
- Thread starter Aastii
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Metal Man 2
Member
THANKS Aastii!
FrillyBits
New Member
BlackViper for XP
Great guide :good:
Maybe an oversight?
I see under the heading Win 7 Specific Fixes you have recommended 5. Disable Windows Services using the settings supplied by BlackViper but BlackViper is not mentioned under XP Specific Fixes.
Using the BlackViper Safe settings on my XP (32bit) has sped up my startup time and general PC usage, love it
http://www.blackviper.com/wiki/Main_Page
Great guide :good:
Maybe an oversight?
I see under the heading Win 7 Specific Fixes you have recommended 5. Disable Windows Services using the settings supplied by BlackViper but BlackViper is not mentioned under XP Specific Fixes.
Using the BlackViper Safe settings on my XP (32bit) has sped up my startup time and general PC usage, love it
http://www.blackviper.com/wiki/Main_Page
Aastii
VIP Member
While it only helps to speed up how fast windows boots:
Start > msconfig > Boot > Advanced > Numproc
sets how many cores windows will use when booting
A lot of people buy SSD's and don't even know how to set that!
It is already in there
@Frillybits Loving the name
and also, thanks very much for the advice, will get it in there next update, thanks 
gamblingman
VIP Member
Did you mean to mark the links at the bottom in RED also?
I like your guide, its arranged nicely and has a lot of useful info. Have you thought of adding a "context" to the beginning of the guide? So that people looking at the guide know what is included and a general location of each section.
These are some of the items I would add to the cleaning. I didnt go into tremendous detail because I'm just trying to give an idea of the things I thought might be beneficial to add. I would add the majority of these suggestions toward the beginning of the "general fixes" area. They are numbered for clarity and for general order of being done, but of course its us to you Aastii.
1. Run CheckDisk first to be sure you aren't trying to reorganize a damaged hard drive.
2. Run Malwarebytes (post it and HJT log in computer security if anything is found by MWB)
3. Run SuperAntiSpyware
4. Check for updates and/or new versions of:
5. For safety, turn off remote assistance: "dont allow this computer to be controlled remotely"
6. Disable Microsoft error reporting
7. Make or Order the system restore and utility disks for the OS.
8. Turn off fast user switching
9. Turn off Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
I like your guide, its arranged nicely and has a lot of useful info. Have you thought of adding a "context" to the beginning of the guide? So that people looking at the guide know what is included and a general location of each section.
These are some of the items I would add to the cleaning. I didnt go into tremendous detail because I'm just trying to give an idea of the things I thought might be beneficial to add. I would add the majority of these suggestions toward the beginning of the "general fixes" area. They are numbered for clarity and for general order of being done, but of course its us to you Aastii.
1. Run CheckDisk first to be sure you aren't trying to reorganize a damaged hard drive.
2. Run Malwarebytes (post it and HJT log in computer security if anything is found by MWB)
3. Run SuperAntiSpyware
4. Check for updates and/or new versions of:
the anti-virus program (it should be doing this by auto, but it cant hurt to check for updates manually.)
Java
Adobe
Apple
Windows
Real Player
DivX
Google Software
your brower(s) and check for updates on your add-ons
any cleaning/repair software you have
check for patches/updates to games
Check for updates/new versions/patches of any other software not mentioned but which may require occasional updating.
Java
Adobe
Apple
Windows
Real Player
DivX
Google Software
your brower(s) and check for updates on your add-ons
any cleaning/repair software you have
check for patches/updates to games
Check for updates/new versions/patches of any other software not mentioned but which may require occasional updating.
5. For safety, turn off remote assistance: "dont allow this computer to be controlled remotely"
6. Disable Microsoft error reporting
7. Make or Order the system restore and utility disks for the OS.
8. Turn off fast user switching
9. Turn off Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
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Aastii
VIP Member
Because solid state memory has a retrieval time of near 0 seconds, rather than put data into the hard drive cache, which in comparison has a huge retrieval time, your USB device will be there for putting data into from primary memory (RAM). It acts as extra memory, just like the cache does, but gets rid of retrieval times.
If you don't know what caching is, just think of ReadyBoost as giving your system extra RAM without putting RAM in your system.
Caching is the process of moving data that has not been accessed for a long time (in computer terms) from RAM into a reserved section of secondary storage for the purpose of freeing up primary memory. It does this so more important data can take advantage of the speed of RAM and also so it can be directly accessed by the CPU (data not in primary memory can not be accessed by the CPU, data must first be loaded into RAM to be processed), and to increase your overall system memory so you can have more "stuff" open at once and to have a section of RAM available for a new program or piece of data to be loaded into.
There is, however a disadvantage to this, which is speed. By moving data, you are taking up processor time which could potentially be used for other more useful means, and when you load and unload data from secondary storage (hard drive, CD/DVD etc) you are bottlenecked by retrieval times and, in some cases, read/write speeds.
So by getting rid of the retrieval times by using electronic solid state memory, rather than mechanical hard drives, you will be giving yourself extra storage, without using up space in the hard drive or any read/write bandwidth of the hard drive and you will be able to write and retrieve data faster than if you were to use a conventional hard drive
@gamblingman, when I have some more time, I will look over each point in detail and see the feasibility of them, but there are some excellent suggestions in there. Thank you very much for the praise and for the suggestions
Aastii
VIP Member
Not all Anti-virus programs are resource hogs, that is true, however go and look at the resource usage and the speed of Avast compared to say Norton, Mcafee or even Panda
CraigEvander
New Member
Just found out that apparently Avast is the more Windows friendly and at the same time safe antivirus on the market so far.
2048Megabytes
Active Member
If a system has 768 megabytes or more of RAM I set the pagefile size to only 900 megabytes in size. I have yet to have any problems doing it this way. Is there anything wrong with doing this?
Edit: Why does Windows recommend you have such a large pagefile? A laptop I am on right now has 3 gigabytes of RAM. It is recommending I set the pagefile around 3 to 4 gigabytes. I set it at 900 megabytes.
Edit: Why does Windows recommend you have such a large pagefile? A laptop I am on right now has 3 gigabytes of RAM. It is recommending I set the pagefile around 3 to 4 gigabytes. I set it at 900 megabytes.
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Aastii
VIP Member
No, there is nothing wrong with doing this. The 1.5x the page file is for two reasons - Stability and speed. It keeps memory free, rather than forcing Windows to store data that isn't being accessed in RAM, which improves speed massively. For stability - if your system runs out of page file space you are going to start encountering problems. You can tell if you are running low on page file space because you will get a message saying "Your system is low on virtual memory". If this happens, I would bump it up to 1GB, to get that ~1.5x the size of the installed RAM. With 900MB being so close to that, it shouldn't make a huge amount of difference unless you have a lot of programs open.
As to why Windows recommends such a large page file, some programs will say "I need x amount of memory" based on the amount of memory installed. If you manually set it to a very low value, which you have, it can stop it from opening, come up with the message mentioned above or crash your system. I would always stick to the 3GB, just for the sake of stability and not wasting memory. To you it may seem like a waste of 2GB of space, but to the computer, it is loving it
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2048Megabytes
Active Member
I agree. USB 2.0 devices are going to be slower than almost all hard disk drives that are a few years old.
Aastii
VIP Member
I was skeptical myself and so tried it on my netbook. Intel Atom, 512MB RAM, Windows 7 with a 2GB flash drive, and it improved the speed of the machine a hell of a lot. Everything loaded more quickly and overall was more responsive
How it would work on a system with a fairly quick hard drive, or an SSD (heaven forbid anyone put any decent sized cache on one), I don't know, I haven't tried it on mine to find out, but for older or more entry level machines, it does provide a performance gain
tlarkin
VIP Member
I won't buy into it unless I actually see some hard data. USB dirves are going to be way slower than a hard disk, so it is in return slower than virtual memory. Plus since Windows caches things out to RAM now on the constant since Vista, if you have 4gigs of RAM it most likely won't do much at all, and probably do nothing.
I think it is just a marketing scheme where MS had to put in features that competitors don't support. If it was truly that awesome of an idea, open source would have had it a long time ago. Since open source is generally ahead of closed source by several years in terms of technology.
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