stripping down my Vista install

[Dorkenstein]

Would I gain performance in Vista 64 if I ran V-Lite on my disc and re-installed it? This is assuming I read a good guide on the subject beforehand.

Would I only save hard drive space (not important) or would I get better speeds in applications and games (would be great)? Thanks for any help.

 

[The Keeper]

Saving disk space is pretty much all you would gain. And even then you'd be probably looking for trouble. You may very well encounter a scenario where you've removed files that were needed. This may apply to windows updates, 3rd party software or simply a rarely used software bundled with Vista. In my opinion it's more trouble than it's worth. Vista SP1 performs well as it is. No need to v-lite, tweak registry, tweak services, etc. Most tweak guides out there don't even know what they're talking about anyway.

 

[Billb2]

What he said.........

Yes, it would be faster.........
Yes, it would eventually be a problem..........

The way to do it is to have two installs.
One stripped out (gaming/benching) and one regular for everyday computing.
Then you just leave the stripped out install alone, no updates, no networking, no internets/AV/Firewall, etc.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: Billb2
Yes, it would be faster.........

No, it will not.

You will only save on disk space.

If you do not have a Vista SP1 disk, you can make it using Vlite (for one specific version of Vista only).
So, you may save some time if you do many installs, considering how long it takes to apply SP1.

 

[Griffinhart]

I have never seen a single benchmark that shows vLite would increase performance. I have, however, seen cases where it causes problems.

Honestly, the best Vista performance tip one can give is to let it do its thing. Well, that and the usual, don't overload startup with useless stuff.

It's also worth noting that Vista's performance is at its absolute worse just after install. It improves over the first day or three as Superfetch and other self tuning utilities do their thing.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: Griffinhart
I have never seen a single benchmark that shows vLite would increase performance.

You haven't looked very hard. A stripped OS will yield tremendous improvements in benchmarks.

Why would you want, for example, fax service for benchmarking?

I ran a stripped XP Pro (only 4 services) for SuperPi benching, it made a big difference.

As to causing problems for everyday use ...sure will!

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: Billb2

Originally posted by: Griffinhart
I have never seen a single benchmark that shows vLite would increase performance.

You haven't looked very hard. A stripped OS will yield tremendous improvements in benchmarks.

Why would you want, for example, fax service for benchmarking?

I ran a stripped XP Pro (only 4 services) for SuperPi benching, it made a big difference.

As to causing problems for everyday use ...sure will!

You really don't understand how processes and services work in Vista, do you? The biggest difference between XP and Vista on a performance level is that Vista uses a priority IO system and XP does not. Services like the fax service do not use any resources until needed because they are set at a low priority. Stripping any of these things from Vista does not give a performance boost because these things do not run until needed and they give priority to your programs.

The fact is that the best performance tweak you can do to Vista is to leave most things alone. Turning off real time scanning on Defender and turning off the sidebar are the only things you can directly do in Vista to improve performance.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: soonerproud

Originally posted by: Billb2

Originally posted by: Griffinhart
I have never seen a single benchmark that shows vLite would increase performance.

You haven't looked very hard. A stripped OS will yield tremendous improvements in benchmarks.

Why would you want, for example, fax service for benchmarking?

I ran a stripped XP Pro (only 4 services) for SuperPi benching, it made a big difference.

As to causing problems for everyday use ...sure will!

Services like the fax service do not use any resources until needed

Hmmmm
Then how come these services (which certainly are not necessary for benchmarking) are using memory? Process explorer

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: Billb2
Then how come these services (which certainly are not necessary for benchmarking) are using memory? Process explorer

They are using memory because they are not interfering with anything else that is running at a higher priority. When something needs the memory, Process Explorer will be dumped from memory and the newly freed space will be used by the application. This is what I mean by my earlier statement that you have no clue how services (and other processes) work in Vista.

In other words, stripping all these processes and services from Vista will not result in a better or faster performing system and may in fact hurt performance. Vista does an excellent job of managing memory and does not need to be stripped down like XP did.

 

[JACKDRUID]

Originally posted by: soonerproud

They are using memory because they are not interfering with anything else that is running at a higher priority. When something needs the memory, Process Explorer will be dumped from memory and the newly freed space will be used by the application.

doesn't really make sense...

the reason these services are in memory is for the purpose of readily, quick access. if a service is 'dumped', it will have to be reinitiated (from slow harddrive) when it is needed, and therefore take more time and slow down the computer.

it may help in some cases, but most likely not. Unless your computer is starviing for memory, a dump of service to harddrive is most likely not needed and surely will slow down your computer.

 

[Smilin]

Geez.

Go read chapter 7 or 8 in Windows Internals...whichever one is memory management.

The only time I've seen NT based OSs need performance tweaking is on servers where there is a strong demand for some given task..server service needing more memory or PTEs. All these "make Vista run faster!" guides and utilities are pretty much wannabes trying to get their page hits up.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: JACKDRUID

Originally posted by: soonerproud

They are using memory because they are not interfering with anything else that is running at a higher priority. When something needs the memory, Process Explorer will be dumped from memory and the newly freed space will be used by the application.

doesn't really make sense...

the reason these services are in memory is for the purpose of readily, quick access. if a service is 'dumped', it will have to be reinitiated (from slow harddrive) when it is needed, and therefore take more time and slow down the computer.

it may help in some cases, but most likely not. Unless your computer is starviing for memory, a dump of service to harddrive is most likely not needed and surely will slow down your computer.

Ever heard of the page file? That is where Vista writes those processes to when programs need more memory. Since these processes are not needed during benchmarking, there is no perceivable performance hit by moving these processes to the PF. Once done using that memory, Superfetch will write those processes right back to the memory. You are not going to notice any performance hit on low level services being moved back and forth from the PF to memory.

 

[nerp]

I'd chuckle if he disables his pagefile too. Haha. No wonder he's tweaking to improve performance. Looks like he's hobbling it from the gate.

 

[JACKDRUID]

Originally posted by: soonerproud

Ever heard of the page file? .

page file existed since win 3.1

whenever you write ( to a page file on hd) and then read (from a page file on hd) you lose performance. ALL window versions since win95(?) try to load as much into memory as possible on startup, to improve performance (improve multitasking performance).

the very reason to 'strip' down process is because they are not needed at all, therefore , you simply do not load them. you save memory therefore less read/write to page file, improve performance.

threfore, stripping improve single application performance and clear memory clutter.

but if you ever need to start a service that has been stripped, it'll take much longer to load them. but as long as you stripped only service are never needed, you improve performance.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Originally posted by: nerp
I'd chuckle if he disables his pagefile too. Haha. No wonder he's tweaking to improve performance. Looks like he's hobbling it from the gate.

Nope, my page file is intact.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: JACKDRUID

Originally posted by: soonerproud

Ever heard of the page file? .

page file existed since win 3.1

whenever you write ( to a page file on hd) and then read (from a page file on hd) you lose performance. ALL window versions since win95(?) try to load as much into memory as possible on startup, to improve performance (improve multitasking performance).

the very reason to 'strip' down process is because they are not needed at all, therefore , you simply do not load them. you save memory therefore less read/write to page file, improve performance.

threfore, stripping improve single application performance and clear memory clutter.

but if you ever need to start a service that has been stripped, it'll take much longer to load them. but as long as you stripped only service are never needed, you improve performance.

False given that if not needed, a service (fax service) isn't accessed and so isn't a performance drag.

You're aware you're (royal you) trying (badly) to debate with MS engineers here, right?

 

[JACKDRUID]

Originally posted by: dclive


False given that if not needed, a service (fax service) isn't accessed and so isn't a performance drag.

even if its not needed, a service that is 'started' is loaded into memory, taking up memory space.

You're aware you're (royal you) trying (badly) to debate with MS engineers here, right?

check programming forum sticky.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: JACKDRUID
but if you ever need to start a service that has been stripped, it'll take much longer to load them. but as long as you stripped only service are never needed, you improve performance.

Aye, if something is NEVER needed then disabling it would be ok. Don't take things to retarded extremes though. The performance hit from something that is going unused is so tiny that it's not even worth the effort to click 'disable'.

Letting the spooler service run with no installed printers is not going to cost you a point in 3D Mark.

In some cases clicking disable is going to cause you a bad performance hit. Superfetch and defrag are examples.



Also - Folks are reading this wrong...
http://img360.imageshack.us/my...e=vistaserviceswg9.jpg

The working set for PID 1052 includes all hosted services. If you want statistics on individual services you'll need to launch them in their own SVCHost process. You really can't tell anything useful from that screenshot. At least drill into the threads tab and look at the callstacks. I bet most of those things are completely idle in a wait state.

 

[Nothinman]

Then how come these services (which certainly are not necessary for benchmarking) are using memory?

Well those aren't a great example because they're all sharing the same memory space since they're all a part of that one svchost instance. But of course something running in the background will use memory even if it's not doing anything. But most of those services are only using a few megs of memory each so you might be able to trim down idle usage by a couple of dozen megs but that's about it. And it won't buy you much because those are the first to be evicted when memory becomes tight.

It might help out in some benchmarks but in real life the difference will be negligable and usually isn't worth the time it takes to do it.

Ever heard of the page file? That is where Vista writes those processes to when programs need more memory.

Actually the only stuff that goes into the pagefile is that which has no other backing store. That usually ends up just being modified pages of application data and anonymous mappings. Executables, shared libraries, mmap'd files, etc already have a file on disk so Windows just uses that to get the data back if necessary.

 

[hclarkjr]

vlite is a very useful tool if used correctly. if you go to their forums located here you will see that it is a work in progress. i love how some people criticize something they have never used and know nothing about. i have used nlite and vlite for years with no problems at all. sure you have to be careful what you remove but that is what the forums i linked to are for. these programs to me are not for the average user and require some understanding on what you are removing and adding. if it wasn't for vlite service pack slipstreaming could not be done.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: hclarkjr
vlite is a very useful tool if used correctly. if you go to their forums located here you will see that it is a work in progress. i love how some people criticize something they have never used and know nothing about. i have used nlite and vlite for years with no problems at all. sure you have to be careful what you remove but that is what the forums i linked to are for. these programs to me are not for the average user and require some understanding on what you are removing and adding. if it wasn't for vlite service pack slipstreaming could not be done.

No one here is saying there are not legitimate uses of nlite/vlite. All we are saying is that there is no real performance gain from using vlite to strip out unnecessary services from Vista for benchmarking. None of the people proclaiming that stripping these bits out of Vista improves benchmarking scores have linked one shred of evidence to prove that to be the case. Almost all of your professional benchmarking sites claim there is no real performance gain by doing so.