Tweaking Windows for performance

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This is going to be controversial but this is a good article by someone who knows what they are talking about – Windows tweaking and optimization: myths and reality.

Joe

--Joe

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We all know (or should) its 90% (or more) bunk, but perception is 9 tenths of the gray matter! I actually take a little performance hit I’m sure by insisting on running WindowBlinds and a couple other “accentuation” programs but ask me if I care….not even 0% because the experience for me is soooo much better, so even the terms tweaking and optimization are in a gray area if you ask me. Tweaked and optimized for experience or tweaked and optimized for ultimate functionality?

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Tweaking or should I say customizing is more about making Windows work the way you want it to work. If you can tweak a setting for a particular program that causes it to open a certain way that is more efficient for you then you have made your computing experience faster. Perhaps many of the tweaks we use on our Windows systems do not result in large increases in speed each, but a small increase in efficiency added to another and another can make an actual difference in the time we spend on projects. Perhaps this is related to figuring out how or what is the best way of doing something with an app. Perhaps this is already built into the app, but we do not know of it. Regardless, if we become more efficient with this app because of a tweak to bring a built in feature of an app to mind, then for us this app has suddenly become faster to use. If an app becomes faster for us to use then our computing is faster, so in a way these tweaks do speed up our computing just because they show us how to use the built in features that were hidden to us before the tweak.

I do hope this makes sense to the masses, even if in geek speak it does not.

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Tweaking or should I say customizing is more about making Windows work the way you want it to work. If you can tweak a setting for a particular program that causes it to open a certain way that is more efficient for you then you have made your computing experience faster. Perhaps many of the tweaks we use on our Windows systems do not result in large increases in speed each, but a small increase in efficiency added to another and another can make an actual difference in the time we spend on projects. Perhaps this is related to figuring out how or what is the best way of doing something with an app. Perhaps this is already built into the app, but we do not know of it. Regardless, if we become more efficient with this app because of a tweak to bring a built in feature of an app to mind, then for us this app has suddenly become faster to use. If an app becomes faster for us to use then our computing is faster, so in a way these tweaks do speed up our computing just because they show us how to use the built in features that were hidden to us before the tweak.

You are missing the point. You are talking about tweaking, customizing, & configuring application programs. The post is about tweaking Windows itself. People spend way too much time & effort chasing down obscure settings in Windows and changing them for no good reason. As I’ve posted in the past, show me the data. I’ve not seen any study of tweaking that can consistently show a significant performance improvement in Windows.

Joe

--Joe

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Tweaking is about trade offs; What functionality your willing to loose in certain areas in order to gain in others.

TweakHound’s Super XP Tweaking Guide – SP3 Final
TweakHound’s Tweaking Windows 7

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“A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.

If you truly believe that Windows, right out of the box, is already as good as it will ever be, then you won’t be willing to try something that just might make it better. Inside the box, Windows comes with tons of SAFE defaults built in, so it will run without crashing on the greatest number of PC’s in the world, even PC’s with only 256 megs of ram.

But for every SAFE default, there is a tweak or adjustment that will improve performance. I regularly use just one registry tweak that makes a huge difference in the efficiency of XP, Vista or Win-7. I was poking around in another forum where I posted, several years ago and found this Gem.

I do that simple registry tweak on every PC I set up.
Here’s a good write-up on the subject:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,887799,00.asp

If you really understand how Windows works, you’ll know that this tweak Works Wonders!

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

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”A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.

Dr Who said it best with this quote. It’s not worth my time to go back through my tweaks to enumerate them here. You will not be convinced and so be it. I am not missing your point. You do not believe these tweaks work. That’s your perogative. If Win 7 works great for you with all the default settings, that’s great. I just do not believe the settings that work for the masses are best for me, and I do not believe I am alone in this thought. Suffice it to say that I utilize tips from many sources, some of which are included below:

How To Geeks

Windows Seven Forums

Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows 7

and many others. I believe the fun and learning is in the investigation for yourself as well as getting tips from others. These sites have many tips that just make Win 7 work better and faster.

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”A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.

If you truly believe that Windows, right out of the box, is already as good as it will ever be, then you won’t be willing to try something that just might make it better. Inside the box, Windows comes with tons of SAFE defaults built in, so it will run without crashing on the greatest number of PC’s in the world, even PC’s with only 256 megs of ram.

But for every SAFE default, there is a tweak or adjustment that will improve performance. I regularly use just one registry tweak that makes a huge difference in the efficiency of XP, Vista or Win-7. I was poking around in another forum where I posted, several years ago and found this Gem.

I do that simple registry tweak on every PC I set up.
Here’s a good write-up on the subject:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,887799,00.asp

If you really understand how Windows works, you’ll know that this tweak Works Wonders!

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

The link is broken

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The link is broken

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,887799,00.asp It’s from 2003, “Lock the Windows Kernel In RAM”.

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Dr Who,

I could not agree more. I had not seen this one Whole link,(You link was all shown but only partly linked. I added this to my favorites). Because I can not document how many seconds or minutes I save does not mean things do not work faster. I tweak my boot time in msconfig.exe and it does speed up the Windows boot. I make other tweaks that do speed things up. I don’t have time to spend timing things, I just know they work, for Windows as well as apps. As Joe is so fond of saying, That’s why they call it personal computing because we us it as we want. Well I believe tweaking Windows does work. No not every tweak will work as claimed, but many do work.

By the way Dr Who, this deserves a thumbs Up. Thanks for the useful info.

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Have a look at the date of the article, Lock the Windows Kernel In RAM – The Middle Ground | PCMag.com. It is over 7 years old. It was written for a time when most people thought 512 MB of RAM was a lot. With todays memory sizes that are often 8 times or more larger this settings is useless for most people. Windows will not unload anything until the memory is needed. Strategies for managing RAM have changed considerably since 2003. Locking anything in memory might cause more issues than it solves in a tight memory situation. You can’t tell unless you do some serious permformance analysis which involves much more than changing a setting and saying this worked 7 years ago so it is still valid now.

@Ted, you are still missing the point. If you choose to tweak your boot process that is fine. It enables you to start using the PC more quickly when you boot the system. I get that and I’m all for that. But that has virtually no effect on how your system performs for the rest of the time you use it. Would you care to enumerate the “many that do work” and how they work and the tangible benefit that is received?

Joe

--Joe

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I am not missing your point. You do not believe these tweaks work.

I didn’t interpret that at all from Joe’s post, he’s just saying they do very little and the ones indicated that do apparently a lot, are not directly applicable to what I feel is a more focused subject and therefore should not include program customization or boot up. I mean I boot so infrequently it is of no consequence if it takes 1 minute or 2.

To prove the point, you can choose any pre-2006 personal computer you wish and tweak the living you-know-what out of it and I’ll take one of the most recent results of Moore’s Law, stock, and we’ll see who renders a 20 gigabyte video the fastest.

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Byron,

It’s fine if you also believe that the tweaks make very little difference to you as well. That’s again why they call it personal computing. You are in the camp that believes these tweaks make little or no difference. That’s fine. I am in the camp that tweaking does make a difference in the efficiency and speed at which my PC works. I do not believe the default settings work best for everyone. For some they are fine. For others they are not. Since I do not render video at all or minimally it makes no difference to me what settings work best for you. Perhaps you and Joe are missing my point. For how I use my PC tweaking makes a difference to me, and obviously to Dr Who and many others. Perhaps the only difference for me is discovering how it makes a difference. Since I do not make my living fixing PCes, and since I have only built half a dozen PCes in my life, I discover how Windows works best for me by experimenting, by tweaking, and I have found that tweaking does have an effect on my personal computing.

Of course a modern PC will out do a pre 2006 PC because of the internal compenents and their increased power and efficiency. That would be a terrible comparison. Now take 2 identical modern PCes and leave one at default Win 7 Pro or Ultimate and take another and tweak it, I believe the tweaked one would be faster. Perhaps not for rendering video, but since most of us do not render video, so what.

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Ted,

Once again I think you are missing the point of the article. UI tweaking is certainly personal and anyone who cares to should go ahead and do it. Tweaking or customizing the UI of application programs & Windows is completely different from tweaking the Windows Operating System for performance. The vast majority & I mean 99%+ of the tweaks listed at the sites you mentioned fall into one of three categories:

1.) Tweak/modify the Windows UI. The only UI tweak that I know that will affect performance is the Visual Effects tab in Advanced system settings and that will only noticably help if you have an underpowered system to begin with.

2.) Changes to settings that are for older versions of Windows that do not exist anymore such as the SecondLevelDataCache setting (hasn’t been around since Windows 2000 SP1).

3.) Those which provide no benefit whatsoever but still are floating around with a life of their own such as setting the processor numbers for booting in MsConfig (by default all processors are used during boot).

Joe

--Joe

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Dr Who:

On another thread you mentioned Kelley’s Korner. The site seems to be focused on XP. Do you use his scripts on W7? If not,
do you or anyone else know of a comparable W7 site that you can recommend?
I’m with Ted, and like to explore tweaks, scripts, etc.

Thanks,
Dick

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TechNet Blogs > Ask the Performance Team

Cool, a new SYSiNTernals tool…
Introduction to the new Sysinternals tool: RAMMap
RAMMap v1.1

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How about a tweak I’d like to be able to do but don’t seem able to in Win 7? That being specify the processor allocation time for a program when its working. Its not that I can do it in XP so much either (beyond priority and affinity) but XP seems to be less intelligent or less rigorous in reserving processor time for multitasking purposes and so long rendering and other processor intensive projects take significantly less time to complete in XP than they do in Win 7 just because the application gets a bigger share of the processor when at work.

Otherwise, of all the tweaks I’ve made, maybe turning off indexing on drives with a lot of files that don’t need to be accessed often makes a noticible difference to me and not putting more security software on a otherwise well-protected system does make a substantial difference over time but that’s not really a tweak unless its one by omission. Not sure because nothing I’ve ever done ever exceeds the speed and performance of a fresh retail install and I’m probably sensitive down to about 3 seconds difference or so.

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I’m not going to change your mind, you are not going to change mine, so enough said.

While I certainly agree that you are not going to change your mind, you could change my mind by showing me something that works. Give me a description of what is intended or a link to specifics. If it works and can be documented you’ll have changed my mind.

Joe

--Joe

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Directly from Tweak Hound:

Regedit Only Tweaks

Why: User preference. Makes menu navigation more responsive.
Why not: No reason not to though users may want to play with various numbers.

To access the registry: Press the Windows + R keys > in the resulting windows type regedit and then click OK.
To navigate to or within a specific key you simply click the arrows next to it. If there is no arrow then click on the name of the key itself.

Change the keys to the values below:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop]
“MenuShowDelay”=”200” (It is possible to control the interval used to delay the appearance of the cascading menus when you click Start on the Taskbar. Default is 400 millisecs) Note: I usually leave this above 50 msecs. Anything quicker than that causes menus to open when I’m moving to another item and I do not move the cursor quick enough.

“HungAppTimeout”=”4000” (Specifies how long the system waits for user processes to end after the user clicks the End Task command button in Task Manager . If this threshold is exceeded, the End Task dialog box appears, stating that the process did not respond. 5000 millisecs (5 secs) is default)

“WaitToKillAppTimeout”=”5000” (Determines how long the system waits for user processes to end after the user attempts to log off or to shut down Windows 2000. When the time specified in this entry expires, the End Task dialog box appears, stating that the process did not respond. If the value of AutoEndTasks is 1, the system ends the process automatically. Default is 20000 millisecs (20 secs))

The attachment shows the values mine are set to. The MenuShowDelay makes a marked difference each time I for example open Control Panel from the Start Orb which happens a lot. These small decreases add up over time.

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Heck, even the default Start Orb gets tweaked on my PC, right click on the Start Ord and select Properties, then Customize on the Start Menu tab:

This allows me to set items up to open as a menu, which definitely speeds up my use. Now you may say these are UI items, but they are tweaks which speed up my usage of my PC and that is exactly what I am talking about.

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Heck, even the default Start Orb gets tweaked on my PC, right click on the Start Ord and select Properties, then Customize on the Start Menu tab:

This allows me to set items up to open as a menu, which definitely speeds up my use. Now you may say these are UI items, but they are tweaks which speed up my usage of my PC and that is exactly what I am talking about.

Ted, this post and you prior post both increase the efficiency with which you interact with Windows. They do nothing to improve the performance of Windows itself. That is what the point of the orginal article is and my point. There is a huge difference in the performance arena between your efficiency in interacting with Windows and Windows effficiency in running the system.

I’ve got no problem with anyone managing/tweaking the boot process or customizing the start menu, or changing UI settings. That is great and helps us all work better in our own way. But don’t confuse that with making Windows work more efficiently.

BTW, you should be aware that by changing the application timeout settings for hung apps and shutdown you run a larger risk of losing data by decreasing the timeout values. You can force an application or process to terminate that is merely waiting on an external activity to complete. And yes that can happen at any setting. If that is OK with you it is OK with me.

Joe

--Joe

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Ted, this post and you prior post both increase the efficiency with which you interact with Windows. They do nothing to improve the performance of Windows itself. That is what the point of the orginal article is and my point. There is a huge difference in the performance arena between your efficiency in interacting with Windows and Windows effficiency in running the system.

I’ve got no problem with anyone managing/tweaking the boot process or customizing the start menu, or changing UI settings. That is great and helps us all work better in our own way. But don’t confuse that with making Windows work more efficiently.

BTW, you should be aware that by changing the application timeout settings for hung apps and shutdown you run a larger risk of losing data by decreasing the timeout values. You can force an application or process to terminate that is merely waiting on an external activity to complete. And yes that can happen at any setting. If that is OK with you it is OK with me.

Joe

This is all just symantics. My contention is that increasing the effectiveness with which we interact with Windows does inprove the efficiency of Windows. Windows sitting their by itself without a human interacting with it in some manner is useless. We have not gotten to the point where software does our work on it’s own without us telling it when, what and where to do it. Therefore the human interaction, if it is made more efficient, does indeed make Windows more efficient. If Windows becomes more efficient it’s performance is improved. Windows requires human interaction or it’s performance is negligible, it does nothing. With that human interaction it’s performance becomes measureable. Therefore improving the user interface (you seem very fond of this terminology so I will use it) does indeed make Windows performance better because without UI there is no performance at all. Even programs that are long and tedious without much UI were started by a human who had to interface with Windows.

When Byron starts rendering video, he supplies intructions to his PC on which app to use, which video to use, how to output the results, etc. Without these instructions Windows just sits there dumb and deaf so to speak because without the UI there is NO performance. His input is part of what makes Windows have any performance, therefore Windows performance can not be seperated from his UI, and making his UI more efficient increases the overall performance of Windows. Windows performance is made up of both parts because without the Ui there is no performance.

Please let me worry about my data. To date I have lost no data because I have tried to force Windows to stop pondering it’s outcome and do something.

You were right, this is a very controversial subject. It was thus the last time we talked about it a couple of months ago and still is. It seems there was a similar discussion a while back, although I am unable to find it at the moment. We took philosophical opposite sides on the subject and we seem to remain apart. But that is fine. I do gain from all these discussions. I do not have to agree with a person to gain or learn from that person. Sometimes these discussions just get us thinking and investigating, and that is a positive from my perspective. Thank you for your input.

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This is all just symantics. My contention is that increasing the effectiveness with which we interact with Windows does inprove the efficiency of Windows.

To me, this not just semantics. It is in understanding how the system works. If you have a gas grill that requires a match to light the burner and I have a gas grill with the same capacity but an electronic ignition does my grill work more efficiently? My contention is NO. My interface to the grill may be a little more efficient than yours but once lit and running they cook the same amount of food expending the same resource. This is the same with Windows. You are not changing the underlying architecture.

I am not disputing that for the types of PCs we are discussing here that humans are required for meaningful use. Making human interaction more efficient makes human interaction more efficient it does not make Windows more efficient. In fact, it could be the opposite. In a prior post you mentioned changing how fast the startup menu automatically expands entries. By changing that value to a small enough number such as 50 milliseconds you may be instructing Windows to assemble and display those contents much more frequently than required. If you have to or just do move your mouse/pointing device over more than one entry then you’ve made Windows do more work than needed. That time could’ve been spent on something else you were running. Everything is a tradeoff.

Please let me worry about my data. To date I have lost no data because I have tried to force Windows to stop pondering it’s outcome and do something.

My point was not to say I’m worried about your data. I’m not. It was that there can be unintended consequences if you are not aware of what changing these settings can do. If you’ve not lost any data and are fine with that , then great.

Joe

--Joe

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Yes those are nice little efficiency settings, I especially like the Control panel as a menu since in Win7 the standard control panel display now is from left to right and down in rows, so I sit and scan row by row to try and find the right item (since so many names have changed a bit from XP). It saves me several seconds when I use it.

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….. I tweak my boot time in msconfig.exe and it does speed up the Windows boot…..

….. you are still missing the point. If you choose to tweak your boot process that is fine. It enables you to start using the PC more quickly when you boot the system. I get that and I’m all for that. But that has virtually no effect on how your system performs for the rest of the time you use it……

“No effect on how your system performs”?? What about less memory used and fewer processes running?
Have we all seen the performance hit that a PC takes from loading too much “stuff” at Startup. The system is slow to boot and continues to be slow after boot.

If a test is needed, just opt to let all of your programs/processes load at Startup. System will be slower to boot and slower while it is being used after boot.

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”No effect on how your system performs”?? What about less memory used and fewer processes running?
Have we all seen the performance hit that a PC takes from loading too much “stuff” at Startup. The system is slow to boot and continues to be slow after boot.

If a test is needed, just opt to let all of your programs/processes load at Startup. System will be slower to boot and slower while it is being used after boot.

It seems as though you too are missing the point of the original article. Did you read it? Once a system is booted as long as the programs are normal well behaved programs the only time they are going to materially affect how your system is working is if you do not have enough RAM. If Windows needs the memory later and the programs are not active the memory will be made available. If you believe otherwise prove it.

Joe

--Joe

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“No effect on how your system performs”?? What about less memory used and fewer processes running?
Have we all seen the performance hit that a PC takes from loading too much “stuff” at Startup. The system is slow to boot and continues to be slow after boot.

Loading sure, takes more time the 12 or so times a year that I boot (reboot), but it doesn’t stay slow, that’s one of the myths. I can have 75-95 highly inactive processes that don’t slow a thing down or one that is busy all the time that does. Simple as that. Most assume its the accumulation because is a psycological irritant to see processes programs keep putting in the “TSR loop” and, because there is a mathematically greater chance of it occuring with more processes and there can occasionally be startup conflicts. RAM is almost never the bottleneck these days.

Its only the processes and services that have to monitor the system actively (or very poorly performing ones), such as security, that consistenly keep a system under a little more load than might be desirable, but most of them are important as well to the continued well-being of a system under viral threat.

That said, it never hurts to pare them down if one does boot a lot, or has problems with conflicts, and/or just can’t stand the “clutter.”

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Hello – I am not a big fan of loading a bunch of useless tweaks. I apologize for this being such a lengthy post ….

This is going to be controversial but this is a good article by someone who knows what they are talking about – Windows tweaking and optimization: myths and reality[/url].

Joe

Just curious …. How do we know “he knows what” he is talking about? What is known about the article’s author Igor Leyko ? A previous “study” by Igor is quoted in the article. Can anyone read and/or understand that article? It looks Russian to me.
Igor’s study

It seems as though you too are missing the point of the original article. Did you read it? Once a system is booted as long as the programs are normal well behaved programs the only time they are going to materially affect how your system is working is if you do not have enough RAM. If Windows needs the memory later and the programs are not active the memory will be made available. If you believe otherwise prove it.

Joe

Yes, I did read the article in post #1 of this thread. Some qualifiers seem to be included in the post above ….
“as long as the programs are normal well behaved”
Many programs are not normal and well behaved. That is where a Windows tweak such as msconfig comes in.
“if you do not have enough RAM”
Many of us do not have mother boards that can support the maximum amounts of RAM available today. That is where a Windows tweak such as msconfig comes in.

A lot of folks here in the Lounge do not have the latest and greatest Operating System, processors, drives, memory, etc.

Throughout this thread, many comments are asked to provide test results and such as “If you believe otherwise prove it.”

I think the referenced article provides many insights into tests …

Here are quotes from the article ….

The quotes below are per Igor Leyko the author of the article referred to in first post of this thread.
“However, it is difficult to find any measurable results. Few sites present actual results metrics, and when they do, the numbers primarily report decreased boot times.”

“Can you have metrics that show the real effects of any tweaking? In theory, yes. But in practice, no.”

“During the Windows 98 era, I conducted a study on the influence of the ConservativeSwapfileUsage registry key on overall system performance and used mathematical statistics methods to analyze the results”

Tim’s comment – Here is the first paragraph from the “study” he mentioned above …

“Приношу свои извинения за трехмесячный перерыв в рассылке. С одной стороны – лето, отпуск и санаторий вдали от Интернета. С другой стороны – проблема, постепенно подбиравшаяся ко мне и, наконец, ставшая главной – увольнение. Вначале у меня была уверенность, что все пройдет гладко, но, увы, начальство решило по-другому. Вместо того, чтобы, как положено, предоставить квартиру и уволить, квартиру давать не захотели. Попытки мирного решения проблемы оказались безуспешными, и теперь я сужусь со своим командованием. А это потребовало дополнительного времени и усилий, которые я мог бы потратить в более полезных целях :(( Но, увы! “

Tim’s comment – Does anyone understand what was in the “study” quoted above?

“I found I had to conduct hundreds of tests to get accurate and trustworthy system performance results. Do you think someone can spend a week or two accumulating test results to determine the effects that can be achieved by tweaking Windows? I think the answer is no.”

“Windows is a complex operating system with background processes that may affect performance test results.”

“At first, the results of the struggle for performance may not seem very impressive, but a 5 percent difference in performance difference is a large difference. And a couple of simple and easy tweaks may result in performance increases that are as high as 10 percent.”

Tim’s comment – 5 percent difference …. is a large difference.

“You may not feel that 5 to 10 percent performance increases can really make a difference, but they actually can. …… The fewer resources the operating system uses, the faster applications run.”

“So, I conclude that almost all Windows tweaks are fairly useless when it comes to speeding up your computer. To achieve significant results, you’ll need to buy a new computer or upgrade your existing system; at the very least, you’ll need to uninstall some rarely used programs.”

Igor leaves us with buying or upgrading systems.

My home network contains systems with Windows 2000, Win XP and various amounts of memory. Some of my Windows tweaks keep it all running !!!

Sorry for such a long post.

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Just curious …. How do we know “he knows what” he is talking about? What is known about the article’s author Igor Leyko ?

What I do know is that he his a Microsoft MVP in the Systems & Performance area. See Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for what it takes to become an MVP. See MVP Profile for his profile.

Many programs are not normal and well behaved. That is where a Windows tweak such as msconfig comes in.
“if you do not have enough RAM”
Many of us do not have mother boards that can support the maximum amounts of RAM available today. That is where a Windows tweak such as msconfig comes in.

A lot of folks here in the Lounge do not have the latest and greatest Operating System, processors, drives, memory, etc.

If you discover a program that is not behaving as it should you should be looking top fix it or uninstall it not just remove it from startup. Or you live with the way the program works. If you do not have enough RAM Window will use the paging file to try to accomodate your workload. Your open programs after you boot the system are much more a determinging factor in performance than those that are started when you boot the system. If a program is inactive and Windows needs its RAM to do something the program will be written to the pagefile and its RAM resued. It is precisely because many people do not have systems that support the RAM requirments for todays programs but try to use their PC as though it was a new PC that performance suffers. Just think back five years ago. Tabbed browsing was in its infancy. IE7 was the first Microsoft browser to have tabbed browsing baked in. It was released in Oct. 2006. Most people with systems from that vintage and earlier would not think of running 4 or 5 or 6 or more instances of a browser. Now, people routinely run that many tabs or more. If you are running a system from that does not support enough RAM then running many tabs in a browser is going to significantly impact Windows performance. Nothing you do to the boot process is going to materially change this.

“At first, the results of the struggle for performance may not seem very impressive, but a 5 percent difference in performance difference is a large difference. And a couple of simple and easy tweaks may result in performance increases that are as high as 10 percent.”

Tim’s comment – 5 percent difference …. is a large difference.

“You may not feel that 5 to 10 percent performance increases can really make a difference, but they actually can. …… The fewer resources the operating system uses, the faster applications run.”

This was in the context of the Windows development team making code changes to improve performance. And yes when something is included in Windows like that it can be significant.

Joe

--Joe

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Of course, it depends on what one means by “tweaking” in the first place:

1. Is setting up windows to do things automatically, in stead of manually, tweaking? The Such tweaking improves EFFICIENCY, not by doing anything faster, but by saving you the time and effort of doing something while you could be doing something else. (eg scheduling defrag to run in the small hours of the morning while you sleep, as opposed to manually running it yourself every time you require it).

2. Is defragging tweaking? It can enable windows to work “faster” in certain cases (although even this is potentially controversial because some believe the time saved between using a badly fragmented disk and a completely “unfragmented” disk is essentially (milliseconds) so little with modern drives that it is not worth the effort)

3. Is setting windows to “sleep” when you stop working for the day, instead of “shutting down” tweaking? If so, you are saving time by not having to wait for a longer boot-up.

4. Is changing the application timeout settings for hung apps tweaking? Yes. Is it a good idea? It “depends”.

5. Is changing the pagefile size “tweaking”…..?

6. etc etc

7. Does tweaking make windows “faster”? It depends…(!)

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

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Microsoft MVP’s have varying expressions of “tweaks”.

Here is another MVP Profile – MVP Mr. Ramesh Kumar

Mr. Kumar designed Ultimate Windows Tweaker. “With judicious tweaking, it can make your system faster, more stable, and more secure” …. “The tweaker detects whether you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installed and accordingly offers you the relevant tweaks only.”

It is Freeware Ultimate Windows Tweaker

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Microsoft MVP’s have varying expressions of “tweaks”.

Here is another MVP Profile – MVP Mr. Ramesh Kumar

Mr. Kumar designed Ultimate Windows Tweaker. “With judicious tweaking, it can make your system faster, more stable, and more secure” …. “The tweaker detects whether you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installed and accordingly offers you the relevant tweaks only.”

It is Freeware Ultimate Windows Tweaker

As evidenced by this thread, there are varying interpretations of what “tweaking’ is. I knew that and never doubted it. I lean toward the explanantion in the Software section at Tweaking – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which seems to cover most everything that has been mentioned here.

Joe

--Joe

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Everything is a tradeoff.

I’ve realized I’m the big picture type. I do a lot of tweaking and customization, for asthetics, to make me more efficient in using Windows and very occasionally to speed up Windows itself, though 50 milliseconds here and 50 millieseconds there doesn’t affect me in the least but a ticking clock does. I still have very fond memories of my FX55 processor going to 100%, yet still seemingly able to give me just enough processor time to perform utilitarian tasks while rendering video. Overall though, pretty poor performance in true multitasking.

Now with multi-core processors and the management protocols to go with them we get good to very good multitasking performance. However that performance comes with a huge hit in that any individual application does not get to monopolize the processor. THAT tradeoff when only employing one processor-dependent application is huge. A four hour project could easily be trimmed down to 3 or less wtih full utilization, but the decision has been to prioritize multitasking efficiency.

Of course my good old FX55 at 100% is not as fast as a decent core duo running at 65% allocation but it sure would be nice to have the little slider in Windows where one end says Multitasking and the other Full Allocation (first come first serve). That one tweak alone would save more than one hour in 4 (if I have the math right) for a processor-dependant app. and that’s what I’m talking about. I suppose its sort of hardwired into the instruction set though and never will be easy to manipulate but maybe that will change when there are so many cores that a subset can be instructed or dedicated to full allocation while the others handle multitasking?

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I guess we just do not agree on the definition of tweaking. I believe Windows is a system composed of the OS with all apps and you operating it. You can not seperate the OS from the operator because neither can compute effectively without the other. I guess we will always disagree about this. My definition of tweaking is having the entire system work effectively and more efficiently, and that system is composed of all parts of the system. When you make the entire system more efficient you make Windows more efficient, and efficiency corrolates to speed in most cases, after all that is why we try to be more efficient, so we can speed up our work.

Some tweaks affect the Windows system, some tweaks affect our interaction with the system and both speed up our work with Windows.

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Well, without major tweaking, my 2.4Ghz P4 maxed out with 2GB of RAM would only be doing 70-75% of the work it’s doing right now. It boots up using less than 400MB,on 21 processes, including firewall and A/V, and 26 Services on W7.

Sure, I may be losing out on some default frills and corporate functions that I’ll never use anyway but it’s better and more efficient for me now than it was with the default settings.

One great example that people are told never to do (that ties in nicely with Fred’s piece in the newsletter this week) – cleaning out the Prefetch folder. If it’s done correctly, Windows will never try to preload old installer packages from the Temp folder. Go ahead, look at all the dross accumulated in there. Look at the dates, check what the files are. Sure, many of the files are obviously current and needed; parts of the OS and programs you use on a regular basis but what about the others?

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When you make the entire system more efficient you make Windows more efficient, and efficiency corrolates to speed in most cases, after all that is why we try to be more efficient, so we can speed up our work

I’m not so sure about that, more of a by-product because we may be just as likely to have no effect or slow things a bit but it suits us as indivdual users. I think if one is a so-called tweaker, no matter what the exact meaning to us individually, we’re all addicted more or less, or at least fascinated by what a computer can actually accomplish just by processing nearly infinite binary code. Othewise there wouldn’t be such strong defense and passion in the posts on the subject.

Seeking speed and efficiency is just a rationalization for our passion and addiction (though its a good by-product when it is the result). A non-tweaker just uses the computer, doesn’t care how it works, just wants it to work.

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Igor Leyko is not talking about applications or Windows startup in the article, and he says so explicitly. He also never mentions file defragmentation. So all of these posts about this sort of tweaking do not address the article.

What is addressed is Registry Tweaking, as well as the other System Tweaks discussed in several relevant posts in this thread. Leaving aside those few computers which lack sufficient RAM for optimal Windows performance, I think the other tweaks need to pass one of two tests. One is the “stopwatch test”. If you say something is happening faster, you need to actually time it in some objective way, and then report your results. There are developer tools for making this type of assessment, but most metrics in this area seem to deal with Applications (especially Photoshop CS and Microsoft Office and some Database Applications) rather than timing actually Windows Operating System processes. This is why “benchmarking” is so controversial in the tech press.

The other is “eye appeal”. As posted by others here, sometimes it is easier to use Windows if a few things are rearranged or represented by different icons, or color schemes, or captions. I can understand the urge to tweak for this reason. But let’s not call this sort of tweaking a performance enhancement. It is not that. In fact, let’s not call this “tweaking”. Let’s call cosmetic tweaking “customizing” and leave this subject out of the current topic. Igor Leyko is not talking about this sort of “tweaking”.

All of these Windows tweaks, when applied to the Operating system itself, and not to Applications, have been found by the Microsoft Windows development team (Igor Leyko’s group) to have insignificant effects on how long it actually takes Windows to complete its own operations. And that is really the main point of the article. Tweaking can destabilize Windows, even rendering a computer unable to boot. So I take a dim view of Windows tweaking. Even limiting Startups and Services can lead to slower Application launches (Firefox, OpenOffice, MS Office, Photoshop, and Adobe Reader, to name a few) and can interfere with installation of critical Windows Updates and program updates. And Registry Hacking is just downright dangerous. One error and you can spend hours repairing a tweak which saves seconds at best in Windows performance. With the exception of file defragmenting, I have yet to see a “stopwatch” difference in Windows performance as a result of Windows tweaking. Disk wear is also unaffected by most Windows Operating System tweaks. The activity light of your hard drive should prove that. Again, the article never mentioned file defragmentation.

Unless there is a driver conflict, a security conflict, or a timing conflict at Windows Startup, even tweaking Startups and Services is a waste of time in most cases, according to “stopwatch” metrics. Once Windows is up and running, sometimes automatic calls to the Internet, background processes, and automatic updating should be tweaked, but these are more along the lines of Program Options or Browser Settings, than the narrower definition of Windows Operating System tweaks discussed in the Leyko blog.

So, do I tweak Windows? Yes, I do. But only in ways which make the User Interface or a Program Interface easier for me to use. I do have a badly written driver in my Windows XP Pro laptop, so I do have to empty the Windows Prefetch Data periodically. And Firefox on that laptop does eat up RAM, so I have to close and clean Firefox, sometimes with a forced system reboot, once in awhile. And Acronis products tie up Windows Messenger on the same laptop (due to a Windows configuration error — which resulted from a system tweak, by the way –) so I sometimes have to reboot between Acronis backup or validation tasks. And so on…

I like the way Windows 7 Home Premium looks and feels on my new Toshiba Satellite laptop, so I have only tweaked a few things. I made a change so that my name and contact information appear before the Welcome Screen when logging on or switching accounts. (This is in case anyone finds the computer if it is lost — an unlikely event.) And I changed the default Welcome Screen Background Picture. (Both tweaks were made using TweakNow PowerPack 2010, a free program.) Beyond that, I only use cleanup tools and Defraggler for optimizing. And everything seems to run well, with very little increase in antivirus scan times, Image Backup creation times, or amount of disk space used. Windows Startup is also not a problem for me, due to having plenty of hardware overhead. Why fix something which isn’t broken?

So, one time I wanted to make a Security Policy and couldn’t. That urge soon passed. And someone else came out with a better solution anyway, and then Microsoft patched the issue. Small loss.

My short answer is this: Windows XP may benefit from a bit of cosmetic tweaking every so often. But Windows 7, at least for me, does not need much tweaking if any at all. It is just fine as it is. That is, if you set its options correctly from installation onwards. Don’t get misconfigured in the first place, and you may find as I have that you don’t need to reconfigure Windows for any reason other than cosmetic “eye candy” appeal. I do that too, but in moderation. Applications, on the other hand, often need a lot more help . But that is another topic for another time…

-- rc primak

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Igor Leyko is not talking about applications or Windows startup in the article, and he says so explicitly.

I agree for the most part with the whole post but good luck on making it “stick.” All the factors are too integral for most to seperate out in to components like that. For instance I have a devil of a time seperating the OS from the efficiency and speed of the hardware it runs on. Its not a tweak but if I add a good SSD to a system, boom, 3 times the speed…then; where’s the new bottleneck and so on. To me OS tweaking is infinitesimally important compared to that relationship, and why I say most serious tweakers are not running 10 year old systems as the main. The second leading factor that is also far more important is the program-OS relationship. What runs faster; a tweaked fresh install or a tweaked system with 50 programs installed? If one plots a line the first goes almost straight up (who wants to go back to a computer from 1983 and start tweaking that?), the second is a shallow to moderate negative line, I’ve never seen a new install slower than a loaded one unless there’s a hardware problem, the worthwhile task is to keep the line as shallow as possible. The third line, for OS tweaking, well….anyone have a microscope I can borrow?

We must look like frozen chunks of space dust stuck at an Event Horizon to a computer, yet we try to tell it how to be faster.

I’m just happy that I have my old reliable XP around, so I can set the process priority to Realtime and render on a quad core at 88% on average. This thing is flying! Win 7 would be telling me, “no, you may start mutitasking at any moment and I need to be prepared for it so I’m only going to give you about 65% for that process.” That’s not a tweak either but it sure is getting the job done very perceptively faster and all I had to do is be aware of the bottlenecks that really do make a huge difference and turn them to my advantage if I can.

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Many of the XP tweaks actually work for Win-7.
Getting the Windows Kernel up off of the HD and into fast ram works almost anywhere.

I had the fastest Commodore 64 in the country, because I went into the Kernel and bypassed all the SAFE Defaults.
I burned my own Kernel ROM chips and sold them all across the Mid West.
I even did some work on the BIOS chip in my first PC, the IBM XT-Clone. I cut the boot time in half.

I’ve been fighting against SAFE Defaults for about thirty years now. If you know what you’re doing it can work like a champ.
I still have one of the fastest PC’s in the country and this box is about four years old now.
I do a full virus scan in less than ten minutes, a Spybot scan in about five and a whole C partition Ghost backup in about six to seven minutes. All this with XP-Pro-SP3 running on a FAT-32 formatted HD, with a Seagate 200 gig SATA II hard drive.

I work on a lot newer PC’s for my customers, some with 4 core CPU’s and mine will still run off and hide from them.
So do as you like and I’ll continue to tweak and tune for top performance. It’s what I’ve done for a living for the past 20 years.

By the way, did you know that if you don’t tell windows how many cores you want it to use, it will use just one, no matter how many you have. ??
Now that’s MS Dumb!

Kelly’s Korner? I’ve not been there for quite a while so I don’t know what he’s doing with Windows 7.
Black Viper has a whole section on it though and he’s always had a good list of Services that can be shut down for improved performance.
I’ve never regretted taking his advise. Works for me!

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

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By the way, did you know that if you don’t tell windows how many cores you want it to use, it will use just one, no matter how many you have. ??
Now that’s MS Dumb!

I’ve never told Windows how many cores to use but if I watch the Performance tab in Task Manager on my Win7 PC it is obvious that both cores are being used.

Joe

--Joe

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I’ve never told Windows how many cores to use but if I watch the Performance tab in Task Manager on my Win7 PC it is obvious that both cores are being used.

Joe

Joe and Dr. Who —

You are both right. Under Windows XP, Windows does sometimes need to be told how many cores to use. But Vista and Windows 7 seem almost always to recognize and (sometimes) use all available cores, at least in 64-bit versions.

And as for losing the CD/DVD Writer in Windows XP, I have frequently had this issue, and I did have to tweak the Registry and activate two Windows Services to be able to resume burning CDs and DVDs. This is a known bug. So maybe this was not so much of a tweak as a bug-fix. Anyway, it was necessary on some occasions.

Windows XP can on some computers have its kernel placed in RAM, and it makes a big difference in system performance. This is a tweak, and it works. But Windows Vista and Windows 7, especially 64-bit versions, do not benefit on today’s faster multicore computers from this tweak, and it can destabilize these 64-bit Windows versions. So, while it was a great tweak (one which also has been used for Windows 98 and Windows 2000 for many years) the days of doing this tweak are probably over.

On my 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium laptop, I have installed two gadgets and a free application to look at how many cores and how much graphics power are being used in real-time. The Windows 7 Computer Status gadget gives all the system information any techie would want, and GPU Observer works the same way for those who have discreet graphics. GPU-z (nothing to do with CPU-z) is a great little utility for getting details and real-time performance graphing for discreet graphics, especially nVidia graphics. I have all three of these gadgets on my desktop in my Toshiba Satellite.

On my Core i5 CPU, the Computer Status Gadget even shows each hyperthread (four hyperthreads on two cores) separately. Windows Updates seems to activate all four hyperthreads and both cores, but not much else really challenges the CPU. Graphics don’t kick up to maximum performance unless I do video editing with transcoding. The Web is still 32-bit, so the discreet graphics don’t really get much of a workout there. At least, that’s what these gadgets have been telling me.

-- rc primak

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By the way, did you know that if you don’t tell windows how many cores you want it to use, it will use just one, no matter how many you have. ??

My understanding is this was corrected back in XP SP3. To verify, right click on the Taskbar to get the task menu, select Task Manager, and select the Performance tab. If you have a dual core processor, then there should be two CPU Usage History graphs. Or, select Start > Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Processors. If you have a dual core processor, the processor should be listed twice, instead of just once.

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Dr Who,

You and I are of the same mind on tweaking. I also cannot separate hardware, software (including Windows) and UI from these discussions. I believe that any tweak that makes your work faster, makes your system faster because your interface to that system is an integral part of the system. Yes, it may make the way you interface or use your system faster as opposed to making the basic Windows system faster, but who cares, you work faster. I would love to learn more tricks to make Windows itself faster, and do sometimes learn things that may help. If you have any basic suggestions for Win 7, please send them along. I for one would love to hear of them. Thanks for your posts. Cheers right back at ya. Ted

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I have to drink a little swamp water as far as my post on my quad core ripping it up with XP instead of Win 7. True I was utilizing more CPU time so the job was getting done faster…but it was getting done much faster. Turns out the latest DIVX codec is optimized for speed apparently, not so much for quality and my low light sections were looking pretty bad afterward. So now I have to go back and encode them all again in good old reliable XVID 1.3. So not knowing something changed for the worse ends up costing me a whole lot more time and input. Like I said, we humans must look like we’re permanently stuck at the event horizon to a computer.

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But what can it hurt to tell Windows how many processors you want it to use?

It wouldn’t be the first time that windows acknowledged that something does exist, that it won’t use.
I just had that same problem with a CD/DVD drive.
Hardware Manager said it was there, and MY Computer said it wasn’t.
Wouldn’t you just know it…..the fix was a registry tweak!!!

Going back to the tweak to put the Kernel in RAM during boot……
It’s not advisable unless you have plenty of ram so you can give up some without robbing your
programs. It shouldn’t take a NASA scientist to realize that accessing your Kernel from fast ram
instead of a slow hard drive is going to improve performance. The speed difference is astronomical.

My own PC is tweaked and tuned to the max and it’s still the fastest computer I get a chance to work on.
I also see a great speed difference between an OS running on a WD drive and the same OS running on a Seagate drive.

Oh well…….. I see the same detractors on the Automotive forums. Some folks just don’t believe in anything.

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But what can it hurt to tell Windows how many processors you want it to use?

It’s possible I don’t understand what you are referring to. Are you referring to adjusting process affinities or adding the Throttle key to the registry? If neither of those, then please clarify what you are referring to.

Double-checking, the issue of Windows XP not making proper use of multicore processors, as mentioned in Microsoft support article 896256 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256) was definitely corrected in SP3. You can see it on the list of SP3 fixes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946480/). So, anyone with SP3 who doesn’t want to fuss around with this, doesn’t have to.

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It’s possible I don’t understand what you are referring to. Are you referring to adjusting process affinities or adding the Throttle key to the registry? If neither of those, then please clarify what you are referring to.

Double-checking, the issue of Windows XP not making proper use of multicore processors, as mentioned in Microsoft support article 896256 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256) was definitely corrected in SP3. You can see it on the list of SP3 fixes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946480/). So, anyone with SP3 who doesn’t want to fuss around with this, doesn’t have to.

Open msconfig.exe (run, msconfig.exe)

On the Boot Tab choose Advanced Options. On the Advanced Options screen select your number of processors. (duo core – 2, quad core – 4, etc)

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A program that might help assess the effects of tweaking or assist you in deciding what to tweak is Sandra Lite. Available free for stand-alone “non-commercial” PCs/Laptops at Filehippo here:

http://www.filehippo.com/download_sandra_lite/tech/

Note the download File size is 25MB!

Works with: Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / Windows7 / XP64 / Vista64 / Windows7 64

The program gives a pretty detailed assessment of you complete system and also is capable of performing a number of benchmark tests and also a set of “burn-in” routines to stress your system.

This is what the site has to say:

“SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, and so on.”

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

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Dr Who is very brilliant, but the symantics are getting in the way. It is mostly personal preference about tweaking and should be done carefully if you’re talking registry tweaks. I am lucky enough to have three machines that are identical in every way except one is hyperthreaded and they do not have identical hard drives. They are all tweaked for specific purposes. One of them is for scanning viruses on whatever drive I plug into it as a second drive, testing and benchmarking drives, and copying/backing up drives. The hyperthreaded one is my primary desktop machine, and the third one is a media and file server for storing media files and backup images. They all run a slipstreamed version of XP Pro SP3 that I made pre-tweaked using n-lite and of course they each have their own legitamate keys. They each have their own personality and only have a few software differences, but the speed difference between them is noticable. I benchmarked the drives before using them and they run about 90-110 megabytes per second in the real world doing a erase/write/verify test. Of course the drive has to be blank and unformatted to get quality results. Normal desktop drives are about 50 to 70 megs/second using the same test. Good quality sata desktop drives run about 100 to 130 megs/second in the same test. Every component and every piece of software plays it’s part when it comes to speed. I have found that ram and hard drive speed play the biggest role in overall speed, but the tweaks, plus using RAMdrive, cleaning out the junk, defragging, and keeping the registry compact and tidy keep my machines working very fast compared to when I put the original hard drive in it with the original software configuration that it came with. Because of my work, I have tested thousands of drives, done tons of data recovery, cloned hundreds of computers to faster drives, and have at least 300 pounds of hard drives lying around. I got my first computer in ’82 and have been hard core ever since. I don’t care one bit about gaming and couldn’t care less, I care about speed and efficiency to get work done and data integrity. Tweaking is for advanced users who actually read and study and are serious about cloning/backups. Novices should have a pro do their tweaks for them, but the right components can nearly double a computer’s speed. Tweaking is really icing on the cake. I consider most of my tweaks to be trade secrets, not to be a jerk, but PC repair and optimizing is very competitive and margins are low. I need to keep my edge in this business. With no hardware changes, Dr Who, me, and many others can double the out-of-box speed on most computers. Then, if the buget allows, run a few tests to determine hardware bottlenecks, replace a component or two, and have a real screamer. Sometimes I do the stop-watch test in front of the customer before I start, then again when finished for a few different things like; startup time until the hdd light quits flashing, opening the same movie file, opening the same powerpoint presentation, and so on. They are amazed and tell all their friends. I don’t have to advertise and have all the work I can handle.

As far as anyone saying that there is no real benefit to defragging, except on a solid state drive, they are just plain wrong. The speed difference between the front of a drive and the end of the drive can be up to about 30% depending on size and number of platters. A fragmented 8 gig file takes 20 to 25% longer to copy and if it is in a partition toward the end of the drive compared to the front of the drive, add another 20%. The same file, defragmented and on a seperate drive, toward the front of the drive will copy about 50% faster. I could explain to you how to run this test, but I have to get back to work, and besides, it will be fun for you to figure out and run for yourself.

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