Performance-oriented Windows tweaking

[Tsosczb]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
So you don't know how hibernation works either?

I just want to hear how you would explain it. And because you obviously can't read worth shit: I was talking about your statement, not about hibernation itself. But anyway. Come on. Get crackin'.

Right, I'm the ignorant one here. You're the one who said " I have Virtual Memory disabled altogether because I multitask constantly" which is probably the stupidest thing I've seen posted on this forum in a very long time.

Yeah, and it's pretty stupid how you freaking idiots keep taking things out of context. How damn stupid do you have to be to not realize it.

If you had any idea how VM works or even that it's required for protected mode operation in x86 CPUs, you would realize how bad the misinformation you've posted here really is.

Uhh, I wasn't saying how it works, so really you're talking about a whole lot of nothing here. Your crap advice isn't needed, and so aren't your pedantic rants.

 

[Nothinman]

Your crap advice isn't needed, and so aren't your pedantic rants.

Right, and I'm sure everyone here was running around confused as hell until you started posting :/

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Your crap advice isn't needed, and so aren't your pedantic rants.

Right, and I'm sure everyone here was running around confused as hell until you started posting :/

Yep, I was confused as hell before, but now I know that Virtual Memory == Swap file == page file.

 

[Muse]

Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000? I used to use BV's site for Win2000 and figured the guy for being pretty honest. Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread? I think he'd read it with interest and can't imagine it would raise his blood pressure. I don't think he's a jerk. He struck me as a geek's geek, really an OK guy, although he didn't give much insight into his character. He's obviously a busy person. People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV? Or is he actually a jerk?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Muse
Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000? I used to use BV's site for Win2000 and figured the guy for being pretty honest. Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread? I think he'd read it with interest and can't imagine it would raise his blood pressure. I don't think he's a jerk. He struck me as a geek's geek, really an OK guy, although he didn't give much insight into his character. He's obviously a busy person. People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV? Or is he actually a jerk?

I don't think anyone here has claimed he's a jerk or some such, I sure don't know him, and for all I know he could be a very nice guy.
He's giving bad advice though, without actually knowing what he's talking about, which is always a Bad Thing, and that's what some people are pissed off about.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Muse
Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000? I used to use BV's site for Win2000 and figured the guy for being pretty honest. Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread? I think he'd read it with interest and can't imagine it would raise his blood pressure. I don't think he's a jerk. He struck me as a geek's geek, really an OK guy, although he didn't give much insight into his character. He's obviously a busy person. People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV? Or is he actually a jerk?

I don't think anyone here has claimed he's a jerk or some such, I sure don't know him, and for all I know he could be a very nice guy.
He's giving bad advice though, without actually knowing what he's talking about, which is always a Bad Thing, and that's what some people are pissed off about.

Well, sorry, but I have to take issue with the contention that he doesn't know what he's talking about. I think your attitude sums up what I got in reading the first dozen or so posts in this thread (maybe more), and I think it's unfair to BV. Like I say, BV should be shown this thread. I don't think he's a jerk, personally. Among the people I've seen posting their computer advice on the internet I thought he came off as knowledgable and without a particular agenda. My impression was that he didn't have an axe to grind and that he makes his money elsewhere - not from his Windows guides. Am I wrong about that?

 

[Fresh Daemon]

Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000?

Only for XP.

Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread?

What's the point? He never answers his e-mail. His site contains many admonitions not to contact him and his e-mail address isn't public. I contacted him a year ago about errors in his guides, he never wrote me back, so I don't think he's very receptive to criticism. From the lack of maintenance or updates on his site I suspect he doesn't care anymore.

People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV?

This makes no sense. Who is dependent on BV? The people here who think he's ignorant and don't apply any of his advice?

Or is he actually a jerk?

The worst you could say is that I think BV is irresponsible for recommending sweeping and potentially harmful changes to the OS without having perfomed thorough tests first. Compare to a drug company releasing a pill on the market without having conducted clinical trials.

Well, sorry, but I have to take issue with the contention that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

There's no such contention. The contention is that his claims are wrong, he has not run tests, and his terminology is incorrect. This is backed up by plenty of hard evidence, against which BV himself has (or at least posts) absolutely no hard evidence.

You can draw your own conclusions as to whether or not he knows what he is talking about.

Among the people I've seen posting their computer advice on the internet I thought he came off as knowledgable and without a particular agenda. My impression was that he didn't have an axe to grind and that he makes his money elsewhere - not from his Windows guides. Am I wrong about that?

Who knows? This isn't about him, it's about his advice. If it came from someone else I would treat it exactly the same. I'm picking on him because his guide is the most-cited and most-talked-about, he's apparently been on TechTV talking about this nonsense - exactly the same reason why in any discussion of e.g. operating systems, Microsoft will be mentioned at least once. The same is not true for less-used OSes, especially niche ones such as BeOS/Zeta, SkyOS, QNX etc.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Tsosczb
What the hell are you talking about? How does any of that equate to me lying? I already covered the stuff about the tests, and why I disabled it. And adding the "Put up or shut up" sure said something there.

You lied about turning off VM, you did not turn off VM.

Please provide some benchmarks that your "tweaks" helped performance.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Muse

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Muse
Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000? I used to use BV's site for Win2000 and figured the guy for being pretty honest. Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread? I think he'd read it with interest and can't imagine it would raise his blood pressure. I don't think he's a jerk. He struck me as a geek's geek, really an OK guy, although he didn't give much insight into his character. He's obviously a busy person. People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV? Or is he actually a jerk?

I don't think anyone here has claimed he's a jerk or some such, I sure don't know him, and for all I know he could be a very nice guy.
He's giving bad advice though, without actually knowing what he's talking about, which is always a Bad Thing, and that's what some people are pissed off about.

Well, sorry, but I have to take issue with the contention that he doesn't know what he's talking about. I think your attitude sums up what I got in reading the first dozen or so posts in this thread (maybe more), and I think it's unfair to BV. Like I say, BV should be shown this thread. I don't think he's a jerk, personally. Among the people I've seen posting their computer advice on the internet I thought he came off as knowledgable and without a particular agenda. My impression was that he didn't have an axe to grind and that he makes his money elsewhere - not from his Windows guides. Am I wrong about that?

I think you're right about that, I don't think he makes money from his site, nor do I think that was his purpose to begin with.
I guess Fresh Daemon said it best, it's just irresponsible.

Of course, my post about him being an idiot was more of a "bad day reaction", having been the indirect victim of his guides myself, by having to help people who have screwed up their computers following his advice.

 

[Rilex]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Tsosczb
What the hell are you talking about? How does any of that equate to me lying? I already covered the stuff about the tests, and why I disabled it. And adding the "Put up or shut up" sure said something there.

You lied about turning off VM, you did not turn off VM.

Yep, can't be done per my previous post. Inside Windows 4th Edition, Chapter 2.

Please provide some benchmarks that your "tweaks" helped performance.

It may be more appropriate to use Performance Monitor to see the memory pressure differences, but none the less, if an application is demanding memory, it is most likely to get it -- not only that, but if services were in your way (which takes roughly ~60 or so MB in a default configuration), you're already experiencing page file activity which isn't likely going to be solved by saving 10 to 20MB by stopping services.

EDIT: ~60MB is given that these services still remain in physical memory -- which is very doubtful shortly after bootup and the user begins using their applications.

 

[JackMDS]

If some one cannot totally follow the Story concerning VM and pagefile, this might be a Good easy read.

Can the Virtual Memory be turned off on a large machine?
Strictly speaking, Virtual Memory is always in operation and cannot be ?turned off.? What is meant by such wording is ?set the system to use no page file space at all.?
Doing this would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of Virtual memory space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use - the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it - if there is not, they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use.

The above is a quote from: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

The Late Alex Nicole wrote the above page.

Some people leave a nice legacy to be remembered by.

Never the less, all of of the last posts are Not really very relevant to the original intend of the thread.

Unless some one can post a Bona fide results that shows better actual performance after switching off the alleged unnecessary Services, Fresh Daemon results Rulz.

:sun:

P.S. Long Live all the world, including all the Continents.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Muse

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Muse
Did you only do this for XP or is this also valid for Win2000? I used to use BV's site for Win2000 and figured the guy for being pretty honest. Have you contacted him and linked him to this thread? I think he'd read it with interest and can't imagine it would raise his blood pressure. I don't think he's a jerk. He struck me as a geek's geek, really an OK guy, although he didn't give much insight into his character. He's obviously a busy person. People have a tendency to want to diss people they become dependent on, whether deservedly or not. Is that the reason some posters here are hurraying the debunking of DV? Or is he actually a jerk?

I don't think anyone here has claimed he's a jerk or some such, I sure don't know him, and for all I know he could be a very nice guy.
He's giving bad advice though, without actually knowing what he's talking about, which is always a Bad Thing, and that's what some people are pissed off about.

Well, sorry, but I have to take issue with the contention that he doesn't know what he's talking about. I think your attitude sums up what I got in reading the first dozen or so posts in this thread (maybe more), and I think it's unfair to BV. Like I say, BV should be shown this thread. I don't think he's a jerk, personally. Among the people I've seen posting their computer advice on the internet I thought he came off as knowledgable and without a particular agenda. My impression was that he didn't have an axe to grind and that he makes his money elsewhere - not from his Windows guides. Am I wrong about that?

I think you're right about that, I don't think he makes money from his site, nor do I think that was his purpose to begin with.
I guess Fresh Daemon said it best, it's just irresponsible.

Of course, my post about him being an idiot was more of a "bad day reaction", having been the indirect victim of his guides myself, by having to help people who have screwed up their computers following his advice.

OK, I have no problem with this thread now. Thanks very much to the OP and to you, Sunner. I stopped using BV for two reasons, I guess:

1. The last time I tried to go there it was down.

2. One or two things weren't working for me in Win2000 and it turned out it was because I'd turned off a service or two. I think this is the case, anyway.

I am chastened, and will look elsewhere than BV for Windows advice from now on. Maybe a bit OT, but I'm about to reinstall Win2000. Is there any kind of utility in Windows or elsewhere to document what I have installed or do I have to jot it all down on paper before zapping my OS and reinstalling? For instance, all that stuff in my Add/Remove Programs applet. TIA.

 

[Rilex]

Copy and paste that into a vbs file and then double click on it. It will generate a text file with your installed applications in the same folder that you ran the vbs file from.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Rilex


Copy and paste that into a vbs file and then double click on it. It will generate a text file with your installed applications in the same folder that you ran the vbs file from.

I copied this into a file I named myapps.vbs and double clicked it. A Norton Antivirus alert came up recommending I not run the script, that it was malicious. I elected to run the script once.

That's great stuff! Thanks!

 

[JackMDS]

Muse Run this thing too: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1385

Please back to the topic.

Please, every one leave the thread as is, Unless some one can post a Bona fide results that shows better actual performance after switching off the alleged unnecessary Services, Fresh Daemon results Rulz.

:sun:

 

[Tsosczb]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Tsosczb
What the hell are you talking about? How does any of that equate to me lying? I already covered the stuff about the tests, and why I disabled it. And adding the "Put up or shut up" sure said something there.

You lied about turning off VM, you did not turn off VM.

Please provide some benchmarks that your "tweaks" helped performance.

You can't even read with comprehension, there would be no point.

In fact, I guess this post was useless.

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Muse Run this thing too: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1385

Please back to the topic.

Please, every one leave the thread as is, Unless some one can post a Bona fide results that shows better actual performance after switching off the alleged unnecessary Services, Fresh Daemon results Rulz.

:sun:

You can't even accurately measure something like that. All the services run differently, and may randomly do things without you realizing it, which could fall into any test's margin of error.

For instance, you have nearly all the services enabled, and have little to no activity during a given period of time. Then have 10 services disabled, and maybe one of the services still running decides to do some trivial task. Or maybe it doesn't. You never know. The same could be true about almost any given environment. You could run the same test repeatedly, without making changes, and constantly get slightly different results.

The results were inconclusive. They don't prove anything one way or another.

 

[Rilex]

For instance, you have nearly all the services enabled, and have little to no activity during a given period of time. Then have 10 services disabled, and maybe one of the services still running decides to do some trivial task. Or maybe it doesn't. You never know. The same could be true about almost any given environment. You could run the same test repeatedly, without making changes, and constantly get slightly different results.

Since that would be within any margin of error, it wouldn't matter.

Oh, and code always runs based on a particular action. It doesn't just decide to run.

 

[Tsosczb]

Originally posted by: Rilex

For instance, you have nearly all the services enabled, and have little to no activity during a given period of time. Then have 10 services disabled, and maybe one of the services still running decides to do some trivial task. Or maybe it doesn't. You never know. The same could be true about almost any given environment. You could run the same test repeatedly, without making changes, and constantly get slightly different results.

Since that would be within any margin of error, it wouldn't matter.

Uhh, and you miss the point. This is really getting sickening how you people can be so ignorant.

Oh, and code always runs based on a particular action. It doesn't just decide to run.

Ok, so sit at the Task Manager and watch all the columns under the Processes tab. Surely nothing could be called for if you're just watching the display.

 

[Rilex]

This is really getting sickening how you people can be so ignorant.

Then you'll be happy to explain in detail.

Surely nothing could be called for if you're just watching the display.

You assume wrong. You'll note I didn't say based on user action.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

All the services run differently, and may randomly do things without you realizing it, which could fall into any test's margin of error.

Read the original post again. All tests were run 3-5 times and the average of all the results was taken. Had any one test returned a dramatically different result I would have noted it, but I never saw this. The system was rebooted in between test runs. Before any tweaking was done, all benchmarks were run 5 times to show the spread of possible results from lowest to highest - this is the margin of error. You'll note that some tests are more accurate than others, PCMark varies by a few percentage points, but Quake II and Quake III are extremely consistent and won't vary by more than 0.2FPS on the same configuration.

Your error is that you assume I didn't know the margin of error going in. However, I actually took pains to establish it first.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Tsosczb
You can't even read with comprehension, there would be no point.

In fact, I guess this post was useless.

I read just fine. You said you turned off Virtual Memory, provided pictures of your settings which did not illustrate your point, claimed Microsoft calls it VM so it must be true, and act like a total bitch. Whatever kid, come back when you grow a pube.

 

[JackMDS]

When the results are so consistent the Standard Deviation (SD) is almost Zero and thus the Standard Estimate of Error is double "Zilch".

I.e. Unless some one can post a Bona fide results that shows better actual performance after switching off the alleged unnecessary Services, Fresh Daemon results Rulz.

:sun:

 

[filibusterman]

once i get time i will be all over this thing looks scrumptious

 

[Fresh Daemon]

I notice that Angry_Games on DFI-street is recommending these tweaks: http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=21207

I've contacted him, linked to this thread and asked him to take that recommendation down. To everyone who was supportive of this review, if you see any website or anyone plugging BV's tweaks, send them the link to this thread. You know people are going to use them, they're going to end up breaking their systems and people like us are going to have to fix them.

 

[Muse]

Debunking is crucial. Thanks to Fresh Daemon!

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing." - Meister Eckhart

I work in databases, programming, development, design, administration, etcetra and belong to a professional organization and at their annual meeting a couple of years ago they had Fabian Pascal, who's personal penchant is database debunking. I believe he and some of his pet work is the impetus behind this site: Database Debunkings