Performance-oriented Windows tweaking

[Fresh Daemon]

Yeah, the inconsistency and weirdness of the results indicates to me that it's not the tweaks causing these effects at all. But the bottom line is, if you want to go digging around in your services, disable stuff you might need and maybe break something to get an extra 0.3fps, knock yourself out.

 

[JackMDS]

If I understand correctly Part II.

You started with 640MB.

Fresh install took 93.7 MB which left 640-93.7= 546.3MB (minus what ever is in the startup) available.

Safe installed saved 13.7MB (out of 546MB); in reality, it means an improvement of 2.5% in Free available memory.

Bare Bone saved 22MB, which is 4% improvement in Free available memory.

:thumbsup:

:sun:

 

[Fresh Daemon]

Yes. I'll amend the results to reflect that. The bare bones config is useless, you couldn't even run a kiosk with it.

 

[Cerb]

I quit all that stuff as soon as I went to a Duron--the hard drive make a bigger performance differnece than any of that stuff. Interesting to see it can be proven .

 

[Vampirrella]

nice read

 

[mike3uz]

Nice article. Now I have learned that BV's tweaks arent going to give a massive gain. But if you have the ram then why tweak. I think more ram is better.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Presence]

Again ... nice work man. This should be a sticky!

 

[Fresh Daemon]

Part III is now online. Thanks for all your support and to everyone who voted for the sticky! Please spread it around, post it on other forums and get the word out.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Awesome! :beer:!

 

[xtknight]

Thanks for the numbers. I'm glad this has been solved. Cliffs: Blackviper's tweaks are useless.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

Other forums suck! I posted this on Hardforums and on FiringSquad, and within minutes there were idiots saying, "well, it still just feels faster."

At least no-one on AT has been dumb enough to try and shout down benchmarks with subjective, unrepeatable and anecdotal "feelings". AT forever.

Edit: Heh. And the first reply on OCForums, in full and unabridged:

Welcome tro... new member, I'm sorry you have no use for BV window tweaks. I on the other hand have found it to be a very usefull site. Definantly would not recomend novices mess around to much with their windows install though. Good luck with your campaign also.

 

[lxskllr]

Nice work, I found the pagefile benchmarks particuarly interesting. I would have thought that having the pagefile on a seperate disk would help, apparently not.

 

[Fresh Daemon]

I think the problem is that compared to physical RAM, any hard disk is exponentially slower, so to try and optimize the swapfile on such a basis is like arguing whether a one leaky faucet or another would add the most to the water going over Niagara Falls. The performance loss from swapping is so great that any gain from fine-tuning the swapfile would be completely lost in the "background noise" of the overall loss.

 

[theMan]

i think the most important thing is just to set the correct sized page file for the amount of ram you have and the application you use. i think windows handles it fine.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Fresh Daemon
Other forums suck! I posted this on Hardforums and on FiringSquad, and within minutes there were idiots saying, "well, it still just feels faster."

At least no-one on AT has been dumb enough to try and shout down benchmarks with subjective, unrepeatable and anecdotal "feelings". AT forever.

Edit: Heh. And the first reply on OCForums, in full and unabridged:

Welcome tro... new member, I'm sorry you have no use for BV window tweaks. I on the other hand have found it to be a very usefull site. Definantly would not recomend novices mess around to much with their windows install though. Good luck with your campaign also.

Probably because HardOCP is a site that caters more to the extreme end of tweakers, and while there are probably lots of people there who could slap together a water cooler in their sleep, there are probably few people there who understand much of anything of what Black Viper's advice does.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Fresh Daemon
I think the problem is that compared to physical RAM, any hard disk is exponentially slower, so to try and optimize the swapfile on such a basis is like arguing whether a one leaky faucet or another would add the most to the water going over Niagara Falls. The performance loss from swapping is so great that any gain from fine-tuning the swapfile would be completely lost in the "background noise" of the overall loss.

And, Windows XP (and 2k) really do want at piece of the boot drive (as opposed to system drive - but usually are the same) for pagefile. An example would be that if the pagefile is on another drive other than the boot drive, the OS cannot keep the trap info if it occurs. Remembering, of course, that during a trap, you may not be able to trust access to other components, so it may not be safe to write or keep a marker there.

GREAT WORK! You cannot believe how many times I have been slapped down in video forums telling folks that the BV tweaks were not such a good thing and I did not recommend doing a bunch of them (they also heavily use EndItAll2 without understand what they are killing).

Well deserved sticky.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
I stopped using that guide a while ago but it wasn't as a result of thorough testing. Kudos to you!

Now I just disable the services that pose an annoyance or risk such as Messenger, Telnet, Remote Registry, etc...

You want remote registry to be on - if you ever can't log in, but XP boots, that can let you fix it.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
I stopped using that guide a while ago but it wasn't as a result of thorough testing. Kudos to you!

Now I just disable the services that pose an annoyance or risk such as Messenger, Telnet, Remote Registry, etc...

You want remote registry to be on - if you ever can't log in, but XP boots, that can let you fix it.

Actually, it is easier to use Windows PE or Bart's PE to load the reg hive and fix it locally though.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: gsellis

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: PorBleemo
I stopped using that guide a while ago but it wasn't as a result of thorough testing. Kudos to you!

Now I just disable the services that pose an annoyance or risk such as Messenger, Telnet, Remote Registry, etc...

You want remote registry to be on - if you ever can't log in, but XP boots, that can let you fix it.

Actually, it is easier to use Windows PE or Bart's PE to load the reg hive and fix it locally though.

Actually, it's vastly easier to do it remotely, using the "Remote Registry" capability.

Scenario remotely:
1. You discover a problem, go to another PC, go into the registry and fix the problem. (Time: Seconds. All XP boxes have Regedt32 built in.)
2. You can immediately try your fix to see if it worked, no rebooting or waiting. (Time: No waiting for a reboot.)

Scenario BartPE:
1. You discover a problem, find your Bart's PE boot CD, and reboot your first machine, and fix the problem. (Time: At least 5 minutes for the CD to boot, assuming you have it handy).
2. Reboot the machine from PE into XP, and hope you fixed the problem (time: 3-5 minutes to reboot). Hope you don't need to do this again.

Remote Registry is vastly easier and far, far, far faster - and you can easily redo any fixes if you don't do it right the first time.

Summary: Keep remote registry running.

 

[Nothinman]

Remote Registry is vastly easier and far, far, far faster - and you can easily redo any fixes if you don't do it right the first time.

Assuming that you have another Windows machine on then network that you can use and that your problem doesn't affect your networking. A BartPE disc is a far more complete solution.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Remote Registry is vastly easier and far, far, far faster - and you can easily redo any fixes if you don't do it right the first time.

Assuming that you have another Windows machine on then network that you can use and that your problem doesn't affect your networking. A BartPE disc is a far more complete solution.

Just to avoid OT stuff in this thread about PE, I went ahead and created a PE thread.
Bart's PE thread

 

[Fresh Daemon]

GREAT WORK!

Thank you. The reaction here has been very positive and I'm glad that so many people appreciated what I did. Other places where I posted this data are picking up as well, quite a few people on OCforums have taken up against BV tweaks.

Assuming that you have another Windows machine on then network that you can use and that your problem doesn't affect your networking. A BartPE disc is a far more complete solution.

It really depends on what you have, network or standalone. The way I see it there is no reason to disable remote registry either way, since removing it does not give any performance boost, it's not a security risk if you've covered your bases with a firewall, and you never know when it might come in handy.

The only configuration that would really be useful is the "Safe" tweak level, because even with the Power User (and especially with Barebones), a lot of useful functionality was disabled, and there were various errors such as software failing to install and so on. But the memory gains at the "Safe" level are so negligible there is really no point whatsoever.

Probably because HardOCP is a site that caters more to the extreme end of tweakers, and while there are probably lots of people there who could slap together a water cooler in their sleep, there are probably few people there who understand much of anything of what Black Viper's advice does.

Indeed. I think these are the most well-balanced forums out there, there are people here who fit in with the HardOCP/xtremesystems overclocking crowd, people who fit in with the undervolt/underclock/silenced SPCR crowd, and those in between.

Oh, and technically, these forums are also the best. Easy on the eye, great posting/editing/search tools, don't have to type in a tiny window if you don't want to, best moderators on the Net, etc.

 

[JackMDS]

Fresh Daemon

Try to enter the term "Fresh Daemon" to a Google Bar and see what comes in first position.

Shows you something about the Google Engine preference, does Not prefer the others either.

:sun:

 

[magomago]

Excellent! I know people who swear by his guides, thinking they are getting better preformance from their 2.8C or A64, and your guide is PERFECT to show that even at the extremely low end...his "tweaks" do nearly nothing!

 

[thirdlegstump]

Yep. All I do now is leave my services as it is which allows my system to run smoother with less occassional annoying glitches like slow XP logons etc. However, it DOES reduce the amount of memory the system uses so this really depends on what kind of hardware you're running and what effect you're trying to achieve. For most users and gamers with pretty new machines these tweaks would do little and sometimes even backfire at you.