Avoid Tweaks of Dubious Value on Windows.

[anandk]

Lets face it ! Tweaking gives us the satisfaction...of having done something to beat the system ! There is that urge, esp amongst die-hard tweakers, to squeeze out the last drop of performance ! Frankly speaking, the best "tweak" is to throw RAM at it ! Its one BIG healthy dose of tonic to perk up your machine.

There are some tweaks which can at best be considered to be of dubious value. Though most of them may not cause much harm, some of them, if applied indiscriminately may actually hurt performance. Some of them worked with older Windows versions, but are redundant & irrelevant now.

Always Unload DLL (Disable DLL Caching) to free up memory and improve performance. Using this tweak on Windows 2000, XP or Vista has absolutely no effect. This registry key is no longer supported in all post-2000 Windows OS's.

Cleaning the Prefetch Folder. Every time you clean up the Prefetch folder, you delay application load times, the next time you launch them. Its only after the second time that you regain optimal application load times. Only one Prefetch file is created per application . Windows cleans this folder at 128 entries, down to the 32 most used Application's prefetcher files. In Vista this folder does not occupy mre than around 50MB. Cleaning the Prefetcher can therefore be construed actually as a...a temporary self-inflicted unoptimization ! Now why would you want to do that ! The developers of the memory management system of Windows Vista have done a good job...no question about this one.

Disabling Certain Services. Dont take this advice to its extremes, for in fact this could actaully cripple your system ! For instance Disabling the task Schedular to improve performance actuall prevents the Prefetcher and the Layout.ini file from forming or being updated ! Forcing, inter alia, longer application startup times. Never ever shutdown the System Restore Service...never know when it may save your day ! Disbaling the DNS Client Service may decrease the the overall performance of the client computer, and the network traffic for DNS queries increases if the DNS resolver cache is deactivated. This effectively reduces Internet Performance for sites you have previously visited and puts an unnecessary load on your ISP's DNS server.

So do refer a good Services Guide like BlackVipers. Or simply use a safe Program like Tune-Up Utilities. Shutting down services indisciminately is a sureshot prescription for trouble !

Page (Swap) File Tweaks. "Create a Fixed Size Page File to improve performance" : This was relevant in the earlier days of Windows; Definately irrelevant for Vista ! "Eliminate your Page File completely, if you have a large amount of memory installed" : There are simply NO published benchmarks establishing any performance gains from doing so ! And in any case Windows wasn’t designed to run without a page file.

...there may be more... do add....

winvistaclub.

[Charan]

^^Thanks a ton for the TUT Anand

[anandk]

^ welcome

must add some more.

-The ReadyBoost Tweak. Several ways being suggested on the net as to how to make ur USB compatible in Vista with some hacks/tweaks. Here is one for example :
1. Plug the device and open the device properties : Start > My Computer > Right click Device > Properties > Readyboost Tab
2. Select, “Stop retesting this device when I plug it in.” Remove the device.
3. Open Regedit : Start > Type regedit in the search bar
4. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Microsoft /
Windows-NT / CurrentVersion / EMDgmt
Change the Device Status to 2, ReadSpeedKBs to 1000, WriteSpeedKBs to 1000.
5. Re-Plug the device. Readyboost should work.
But using such methods only fools Vista into thinking that such USB drive are compatible. Expect no performance gains in such cases !

-"How to turn the PC 'on' in 10 seconds" ! Modifying the regkey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ ContentIndex some claim makes your PC start in 10 secs ! Changing the default value of its '"Startup Delay/Decimal" from 4800000 to 40000 makes this happen; are the claims.

This has nothing to do with the time it takes for windows to load, only the duration that the welcome screen shows up. And its is my opinion that this is best left at its default value, as a certain delay in startup is required so that necessary programs & services can be fired up properly.

-Deleting junk/files in general, is a good idea from the point of good PC maintenance. But some people like to go on cleaning rampages with the mind set that they are improving performance ! All they are doing is freeing disk space since NTFS performance does not degrade with increased file numbers.

-Setting your CPU's L2 cache in the registry. This tweak is a joke. Windows is designed to detect how much L2 cache you have automatically.

-Enable "Large System Cache". I have read around on many forums about people talking about this setting and how it's supposed to improve performance. This setting is enabled by default for server versions of windows and is good for servers but for the average home user this setting hurts performance. All it does for a home user is increase paging and makes it so more of an application is paged which causes an application to launch slower.

[Gigacore]

^ Thankx a lot

[hemant_mathur]

Great info .. thanx a lot.

[ax3]

superb frd ....... thanx ..........

[ratedrsuperstar]

thnx really had been blind for so long

[aryayush]

Originally Posted by anandk

Never ever shutdown the System Restore Service...never know when it may save your day !

Spot on. You wouldn't believe how many people turn this feature off to "save memory and prevent slow-downs". I keep advising people not to meddle with this feature. It is probably the best feature in Windows.