Performance enhancing dru.. er programs

[Dorkenstein]

Are there any freeware tools out there that really make a performance difference or are they all snake oil?

 

[Nothinman]

Do you really think MS would release an OS that required tons of 3rd party tools to make it run decent?

 

[Dorkenstein]

They do exist, however.

 

[JBT]

Like what? The most I can think of would be trimming down on services sand unwanted programs that are running.

 

[Nothinman]

Like what? The most I can think of would be trimming down on services sand unwanted programs that are running.

Exactly, which doesn't require any 3rd party tools, although they do exist. But ignorant and/or lazy people will spend lots of time and money on useless and wasteful things.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Like what? The most I can think of would be trimming down on services sand unwanted programs that are running.

Exactly, which doesn't require any 3rd party tools, although they do exist. But ignorant and/or lazy people will spend lots of time and money on useless and wasteful things.

Nice subtle jab, thanks anyway.

 

[Nothinman]

It wasn't a jab at you personally.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I overreacted. I was just wondering because there's a lot of sites dedicated to this kind of software and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I thought maybe someone on here had been down the same road. On my last install of windows I did blackviper's steps to tweaking your registry for performance and after a few days I was getting BSOD's on shutdown, which I believe to be related to changing the shutdown time in registry, I must have made it too quick for a certain service. Have you tried those Nothinman, and have you had success?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Guide to Free Performance

 

[Nothinman]

Just so you know, I don't use Windows 99% of the time. I have it installed in VMWare for work because I need to use Outlook, PGP and Excel but that's it. And a lot of the time I can get by with GPG and Gnumeric.

But no I've never tried the BlackViper stuff although I've heard a lot of mixed reviews and his documents on Virtual Memory and pagefile tweaking make me think he really has no idea what he's talking about alteast with regards to that subject.

Basically shutting down some services will save a little memory, not very much because if the service sits idle long enough and doesn't do anything it'll be free'd from memory and only paged back in if it's needed. As I said, I havn't read the whole document but I can't imagine there are any registry tweaks that would do any real good. There some ways to help peformance like putting the pagefile on a seperate physical disk from the OS and your data, that'll help in the case that you actually do use the pagefile because it'll reduce the number of seeks on the OS and data drives. But if you leave the pagefile system managed it'll be fine for most cases because it'll be in the middle of the drive so any extra delays caused by seeking into the pagefile will be minimal.

The best things you can do for performance are get the fastest drives you can, my desktop at home has mostly 15K RPM drives and my notebook has a 7200 RPM drive. And get as much memory as you can, this will allow you to cache a lot of filesystem data into main memory and avoid disk access.