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Vista Newbie
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 9/13/2008 7:59:01 AM
Posts: 22, Visits: 20 |
| Tweaking Vista is necessary, but you've got to do it right. Doing it wrong is risky and wastes time. This list does not include foolish registry hacks, randomly messing around with Services, or other poorly conceived "tweaks." It only includes tweaks that actually give some benefit.
Each tweak on this list has a rationale attached. The tweaks assume you are starting with a vanilla Vista installation.
Apply SP1 - download and put it on, unless it is already. Rationale: improved performance, stability, security, and compatibility.
Turn on 16-bit color - Graphics cards and monitors have different standards for how many bits of colors translate to how many colors displayed. To optimize efficiency, match the number of colors displayed by your video card to the number of colors that your monitor can display.
A graphics adapter displaying 16 bits of color can display 65,536 colors at a time. A graphics adapter at 24 bits can display 16,777,216 colors. A graphics adapter at 32 bits can display the same 24 bits of color plus 8 alpha, transparent bits. Settings the graphics adapter at 24 bits or 32 bits has a performance cost for your entire computer over setting it at 16 bits. Thus, if you want to keep using 24 bits or 32 bits of color, make sure you have a good reason such as that your monitor can actually display 16,777,216 colors at once. In Control Panel (classic view) | Personalize | Display Settings | colors, you can see what your graphics adapter is set at and what your options are, and make changes.
To experiment, pull up a good photograph with lots of colors, taken at a high resolution. View the picture in 32-bit or 24-bit mode, then switch your graphics adapter to 16-bit mode and see if you notice a difference. If you have a normal LCD monitor, chances are that you won't see much of a difference.
If you have an LCD monitor, such as on a laptop or a desktop, your 6-bit monitor can probably only display 262,144 colors at a time, which is comparable to the 65,536 colors displayed by a graphics card set for 16-bit color. Using 24-bits of graphics card color to display on a standard 6-bit LCD monitor is quite wasteful of computing power and gives you little benefit. On the other hand, if you are using an HD television or a CRT (with a tube) as your monitor, that is an 8-bit color monitor which can display 16,777,216 or more colors at a time. With such a monitor, setting the graphics adapter to 24-bit or 32-bit mode actually gives you the lion's share of the benefit, making the performance cost worth it.
If you are willing to sacrifice the alpha mode and transparent effects and Flip 3D, but are not willing to significantly reduce the number of colors displayed on your normal LCD monitor, you can shift your graphics card from 32-bit to 16-bit. The result is a significant performance enhancement with a loss of alpha effects and a few colors that aren't making much of a difference anyway.
Rationale: shifting your graphics card to 16-bit color will noticeably boost performance. It will not significantly reduce the quality of your display, unless you have a CRT, an HD television, a very high end LCD monitor sold to graphics professionals, or other display with 8-bit color. It will also turn off the transparent effects of Aero and Flip 3D. Otherwise, shifting to 16-bit color results in a noticeable performance boost.
Remove visual effects - In Control Panel (classic view) | Performance Items | Adjust visual effects there is a range of effects that can be dropped if you have a poor graphics card, like most ones from Intel. In a pinch you can try "Adjust for best performance" which removes all the effects. The result is a very fast Vista system that looks more like Windows 2000 than the default Vista look. If you still need more performance, disable Aero. Rationale: increased performance in underpowered machines.
Readyboost - Set up ReadyBoost. Use the fastest flash memory available. Flash memory speed is measured differently for reading and writing; both are in megabytes per second. An excellent target would be 10 MB/s writing and 18 MB/s reading. Rationale: increased performance. Try to get at least 2 GB and preferably 4 GB or more of flash memory dedicated to Readyboost. Rationale: increased performance.
Enable write-caching and advanced performance - For systems with a backup power source (like laptops), enable write caching in Control Panel (classic view) | Device Manager | Policies. Rationale: increased performance.
Enable DEP - First, enable it in BIOS. Use SecurAble to make sure it is enabled. Then, in Control Panel (classic view) | System | Advanced System Settings | Advanced: Performance: Settings | Data Execution Prevention, turn DEP on for all programs. Rationale: increased security. Citation: Security Now podcast on DEP.
Disable Windows Media Player sharing - Go to WMP 11 | Library | Media Sharing and uncheck all/both options. Rationale: increased performance.
Increase WMP buffer - go to WMP 11 | press Alt once | Tools | Options | Performance | Network Buffering. Set to 60 seconds. Rationale: much greater chance for steady playback of streaming content.
Disable UPnP - Universal Plug n Play is being phased out. It should not be running. Go to Control Panel (classic view) | Administrative Tools | Services. Disable UPnP. If Internet Connection Sharing is not disabled yet, disable it as well, unless you are relying on this service, which you shouldn't be relying on. Rationale: increased performance, and possibly better security.
Download and install driver updates - from the manufacturer (like HP or Dell or whoever). Rationale: increased performance, reliability, and security.
Eliminate startup junk - stop everything from starting up automatically, unless it's necessary, using Autoruns. Rationale: increased performance.
Boost RAM to 2GB or 3GB - Less might not be enough. More is overkill as Vista 32-bit cannot make use of a full 4 GB as video memory must be mapped within the 4GB memory limit. If you need more than 2GB or 3GB of RAM, install Vista 64-bit. Make sure that the RAM you install is high in quality, such as that from American manufacturer Crucial Technologies, and is the maximum speed for the computer as listed in the manual. Rationale for boosting RAM: increased performance.
Upgrade to 64-bit Vista - Once you need more than 3GB of RAM, or you have multiple graphics cards, upgrading to Vista x64 lets you get to all the RAM and devices you need. If you bought Vista in a Microsoft box, you can get a free x64 DVD from Microsoft. Rationale: increased performance and efficiency.
Increase hard drive space - Delete files, move files to other media, compress files, or upgrade to a bigger hard drive. More hard drive space translates into faster hard drive access. Rationale: increased performance.
Run vsp1cln.exe - After applying SP1, open a command prompt as administrator and run vsp1cln.exe. Rationale: deletes unnecessary files, freeing up hard drive space, improving performance.
Run as administrative user and leave UAC on - In Control Panel (classic view) | User Accounts, you can set your user security level to that of an administrative user. This configuration of running not as "Administrator" but as an administrative user coupled with leaving UAC on allows you to make administrative changes like installing a program by only clicking on a confirm button. No password-typing required. On the other hand, if you see a UAC prompt without knowing why, you can deny permission and investigate to see what's going on. Rationale: increased security and more control over your applications.
Have running only one security program of each type - Have only one firewall, one anti-virus, and one anti-malware program running in the background. If you have installed a third-party firewall, disable Windows Firewall. You should go to Control Panel (classic) | Administrative Tools | Services and make sure Windows Firewall is disabled. If you have a third-party anti-malware scanner installed, such as might come with a security suite, go to the same place and make sure Windows Defender is disabled. Rationale: Two or more programs of the same type interfere with one another. Have only one to help optimize performance and stability.
Leave basic Vista features alone - SuperFetch and the page file are autoconfigured by Vista. The prefetch folder doesn't need "cleaning". Don't use memory optimization software not from Microsoft. Let Vista figure out the best settings. Rationale: security and performance. |
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Lead Forum Moderator
Group: Vista Forum Moderator
Last Login: Today @ 2:47:44 PM
Posts: 2,089, Visits: 2,000 |
| quasar:
Thanks much for the tweaks info. I'm sure that our community will appreciate your contributions.
However, I would like to add a few caveats from my own experience -- just so folks don't expect miracles from the tweaks ...
Readyboost - This only increases performance in those cases where the machine is dramatically under-powered, that is 1GB of RAM or less. Once you hit 2GB, using ReadyBoost will likely not mprove performance, and may actually worsen it. Adding more main system RAM (as you mention) gets you a LOT better performance improvement than ReadyBoost.
Download and install driver updates - from the manufacturer (like HP or Dell or whoever). Would heartily second this and add, from my own experience, that given the choice of a driver upgrade from Windows Update or the manufacturer, I would choose the second every time! I've had driver updates from Window Update trash my machine; never had any bad effects from driver updates from the manufacturers.
Boost RAM to 2GB or 3GB - In my experience, you see the most gain in the second GB of RAM (i.e., 1GB upgraded to 2GB). I've run my own benchmarks of 2GB vs 3GB and have seen no gains.
Upgrade to 64-bit Vista - While I won't argue the improvement, I must stress that you cannot UPGRADE from 32-bit to 64-bit. It require a clean install. Don't want to start getting deluged by posts from folks crying about how they "upgraded" to 64-bit and all their files, settings, and apps are gone!
Run vsp1cln.exe - While I agree with the results, I would suggest waiting a few days or longer after the SP3 upgrade to ensure that the machine is working properly before doing this. Once you do this, you can not roll back to a pre-SP3 state.
Run as administrative user and leave UAC on - It's refreshing to see someone other than one of us Mods recommending against turning off UAC. While I agree that the prompts are annoying, there are quite a number of minor tweaks that can be done to suppress nearly all the prompts -- without the security downfall of turning off UAC.
Leave basic Vista features alone - I would add one more to your suggestion here: Don't run Registry optimization routines, period!! The registry is a database that contains thousands and thousands of entries. Running a tool that cleans out a handful results in virtually no gain at all, and the downside is that the registry gets corrupted, causing the system to crash or be unbootable. We have quite a number of posts in our forums from folks who ran one cleanup tool or another and then, their machine crashed or wouldn't boot anymore.
Again, thanks for the tweaks -- just don't want folks to expect miracle cures.
ASUS A832nSLI-Deluxe, AMD 64X2 4400 OC 2.4GHz, 3GB OCZ,
Running: XP Pro, Vista Ultimate 32-bit, Vista Business, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
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Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 11/30/2008 11:31:44 PM
Posts: 1, Visits: 4 |
| | You gave some good tips that I would have likely followed. As it is, I downloaded TuneUp Utilities 2009 and it did a awesome job inaccordance to my suggestions. My physical memory was hovering around 80%. I went out and bought 2GB of memory from PNY. Now I hover currently around 30% with 0 hard faults. 2.9GB total memory; 2GB available memory. Being new to all of this I believe I wasted $15. I bought a 3-pack 2GB USB 2.0 drive to backup my files. I believe the first attempt ruined one of the usb drives. Ran out of space before backup completed and received an error message. Now I can't seem to do anything with it. Tried to restore the info so I could reuse the drive but info appears to be unavailable. I should've bought more GB's to backup my files. Inexperience speaks for itself. I have two good 2GB usb drives for no known purpose. |
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