Windows 10 Performane Tweak

greatchap

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
103
Hello Everyone,

I just purchased a new PC. I am now going to assemble it and install Windows 10. My new pc spects are :

1) I5-8400
2) Gigabyte B360M Gaming Board
3) 16 GB RAM (2x8 GB)
4) Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB HDD

I want to use this pc for office work and not gaming. However what settings can I tweak to make it work optimally.

For e.g.

a) I do not want to partition the SSD. plus I don't think it makes any difference in performance whether I partition it or not. Am I right ?

b) Since my RAM is 16 Gb what should I set the paging size settings in Windows ?

c) I will turn indexing off.

What more can I do to enhance performance for my PC ?

Thank you,

Regards,
GR
 
Check that the SATA controller is set to AHCI in the UEFI to make sure that you get maximum bandwidth availability through the SATA controller.
Leave the Paging File to system controlled.
Download the latest Samsung Magician software & make sure that Performance Mode is activated on the drive once the OS is installed.

TBH I haven't noticed any real world difference with indexing on or off.

If you want a bit more performance out of the machine, consider allocating some of the RAM to a RAMDisk (4GB should be enough) as that will give the system a bit of a boost in most applications. If it doesn't help you then you can easily remove the software & allocation, but it is worth a shot at least.
 
a) I do not want to partition the SSD. plus I don't think it makes any difference in performance whether I partition it or not. Am I right ?

b) Since my RAM is 16 Gb what should I set the paging size settings in Windows ?

c) I will turn indexing off.


Partitioning will not help performance. Leave the paging at automatic, the OS knows better than you. Leave indexing on, turning it off makes no perceptible difference in performance.


If you want a bit more performance out of the machine, consider allocating some of the RAM to a RAMDisk (4GB should be enough) as that will give the system a bit of a boost in most applications. If it doesn't help you then you can easily remove the software & allocation, but it is worth a shot at least.


Don't bother. The OS is smart enough to cache into RAM everything it's going to be accessing on a regular basis. All you'll be doing with a RAM disk is storing things in memory twice (assuming you properly guess what should be in the RAM disk), and decreasing the amount available to other apps.
 
dont listen to this guy^^
tech yes city on yt has a good tweak guide that will help turn off some background stuff.
 
a) I do not want to partition the SSD. plus I don't think it makes any difference in performance whether I partition it or not. Am I right ?
yes no need to unless you want to due to imaging or other reasons non performance related

b) Since my RAM is 16 Gb what should I set the paging size settings in Windows ?
Leave the size as it ise. spread it across multiple physsical units

c) I will turn indexing off.
Is this a question ?

d) Should i install project mercury to help in CPU heave multitasking
yes
 
dont listen to this guy^^
tech yes city on yt has a good tweak guide that will help turn off some background stuff.
Can you repost this comment without the abbreviations. URL would be best.

Thanks,

x509
 
Can you repost this comment without the abbreviations. URL would be best.

Thanks,

x509
yt=youtube. channel is "tech yes city" then search for windows 10 tweak guide. is that clear enough?
 
Not suggesting you do this, just explaining why some people recommend it...

Partitioning the drive has no effect on performance, BUT it is useful if you want to separate the OS from your data. It is fairly trivial to change your desktop, documents, music, pictures and downloads folders from their default locations on the OS partition to someplace safer. If you need to reinstall the OS for any reason, you don't have to worry so much about losing your files, just reinstall the OS on the OS partition and reinstall your apps.

I personally do a wipe/reinstall of Windows at least once a year (usually corresponding with one of the major releases) and that is why I keep the OS on it's own separate drive or partition. Having just done this with the May 2019 Windows release a few days ago, I can tell you I had my system completely redone in about 4 hours (but I have a LOT of specialized apps that I regularly use; if you are primarily an Office and web browser guy, you could do it in under an hour). System is cruft-free and running at optimal performance.
 
I appreciate the reply, but I don't think the snotty tone is justified.

I get the tone thing, but I don't think Pendragon1 meant it the way it came off. I've read a fair number of his posts and he seems to be a genuinely helpful [H]'er. It WOULD be awesome if there was a stickied forum post somewhere that listed commonly accepted abbreviations - just browsing the forums, I've been confused at times myself.
 
I get the tone thing, but I don't think Pendragon1 meant it the way it came off. I've read a fair number of his posts and he seems to be a genuinely helpful [H]'er. It WOULD be awesome if there was a stickied forum post somewhere that listed commonly accepted abbreviations - just browsing the forums, I've been confused at times myself.

Pendragon1 is a name i remember. and I usual only take notice of people's names if they seem to genuinely like to have technical debate. or are utter Aholes.
I think its the first...

Written text can easily be confused on "tone"
 
Pendragon1 is a name i remember. and I usual only take notice of people's names if they seem to genuinely like to have technical debate. or are utter Aholes.
I think its the first...

Written text can easily be confused on "tone"
thnx! i do try to be helpful and not an ahole. unless someone pushes buttons...

I appreciate the reply, but I don't think the snotty tone is justified.
no snotty tone intended. was on phone, so i kept it short.
 
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Something that doesn’t affect performance but helps me stay focused and productive is using powershell scripts to remove windows apps. I’ve used LTSB but had random issues with it so now I personally use pro with a few powershell scripts run to remove apps and deactivate provisioning new apps.

Here’s a basic run down of how to do it -

While installing windows, make sure to create a local account. This account should NOT be your main account. You can remove it later or keep it as a local admin account if you have a domain at home.

On the first boot, log in with your local account. Run powershell as admin and run this command.

Get-AppXProvisionedPackage -Online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online

This will not remove apps on the current account but will stop them from being provisioned on any new accounts that log in.

Create another local account for yourself or use your personal Microsoft account. Which ever you want, this is your own personal account.

Log in using that account. The only app that will be in your menu will be edge. You will not even have the Microsoft store but there are very simple ways to side load it if you want to add your own apps later.

Enjoy your clean install of W10 pro.
 
Partitioning the hard drive is beneficial because then you can isolate the OS to its own partition and even format C: without losing your data. I always either use a separate storage drive or at minimum partition a different OS partition. Then when Windows inevitably croaks, it's easy to wipe and reinstall.
 
cmd - powercfg -h off

free up some hard drive space. disable hibernate feature.

If you ever have hard drive issues and need to use disk recovery software (in my case, a Kali Linux live drive) I cannot upvote this post enough. The hibernation feature on Windows 10 will make recovery efforts much more difficult.
 
I need to do a fresh install on an untouched image to see what it is. I'll compare.
last one i did was a fresh install of 10 pro (64bit, 1809) and its 16gb after a disk cleanup, should have mentioned that.
 
last one i did was a fresh install of 10 pro (64bit, 1809) and its 16gb after a disk cleanup, should have mentioned that.

Here is a fresh install without internet connected. The second is just plugging in the Ethernet and not even doing any updates.
 

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Here is a fresh install without internet connected. The second is just plugging in the Ethernet and not even doing any updates.
close but not quite 16GB. did you disk cleanup the first? the second is probably doing updates in the background.
 
close but not quite 16GB. did you disk cleanup the first? the second is probably doing updates in the background.
Disk cleanup at install only showed less than 20Mb even selecting clean up system files too. I bet after win updates it will be close to 30gigs. It's going to be more in the future soon anyway. It's ridiculous.
 
Disk cleanup at install only showed less than 20Mb even selecting clean up system files too. I bet after win updates it will be close to 30gigs. It's going to be more in the future soon anyway. It's ridiculous.
disk cleanup estimates are always way off. do a system cleanup and select everything. see what it ends up at. idk about 30Gb but low/mid 20s probably. although MS is letting the new versions uninstall a tonne more stuff so you could whittle it down a bit more. maybe they'll catch on and make that crap configurable during setup.
 
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