Any important Windows tweaks out there ?

SvenBent

2[H]4U
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Sep 13, 2008
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I'm looking for good performance tweaks for windows 7-10 x64 that i can implant in my Project Mercury utility.

I'; looking for something with empirical data. not just. i did this and it "feels" better", so preferably something that can uphold 1-2 of these rules:
1: must provide a somehow technical reasone why it work.
2: must be benchmark able.


Things I'im already having

1 Increasing foreground application to above normal ( only helps games under multitasking CPU heavy stuff)
2: Reducing CPU priority on minimized applications ( again only for multitasking)
3: Disable Core parking (nice boost and no different in power usage in my tests)
4: Remove Windows animations (no really performance but Windows GUI reacts faster)
5: Changes Windows CPU slice size/distribution (no real gains but technical sane)
6: Change system time ( no performance boost just a wanted feature)
7: Disable hyper threading by affinity on foreground application. ( Can be good. can be a disasters. depending on Software)
8: Set affinity to only core0 on foreground appliaation ( mostly for old games that work bad on multicore system
9: Memory cleaner ( absolutly snakeoil...)


Things Ive benchmarked and no implanted:
1: Set power profile to high performance (not done analyzing all data yet. but looks really meh)


Is there any thing I'm missing ?
 
Have you looked at what the Razer Cortex application does? Closing unnecessary programs and processes among other things. Sounds like your along the same vane. Good Luck!
 
I have always tweaked my windows in this way:

1) Install it
2) Use it

If Windows becomes too slow, buy new hardware and repeat steps 1 and 2.
 
Other than some personal preferences for power saving options, system tray icons and WU settings, I don't have any need to tweak Windows, especially in any of the ways you listed.
 
I have always tweaked my windows in this way:

1) Install it
2) Use it

If Windows becomes too slow, buy new hardware and repeat steps 1 and 2.

You might be loosing a lot of CPU performance if you are running with hyperthreaded CPU and multi threaded software that doesn't take benefit of all your logical cores. However if its needed is a different story.
 
Is this purely for benchmark numbers? I am with the others where most of the tweaks you listed seem specific for one application or benchmark test. Are you having problems with a game or application or trying to get a single program running better? Pure system performance on a typical PC would encompass lots of programs with lots of different potential minor tweaks, but for most people the best would not be doing any of the ones you listed with the exception of #4 I guess.
 
Its to improve overall performance.. i'm just looking for improvements that a benchmarkable and not "i feel like it became faster" placebo tweaks.
 
I have always tweaked my windows in this way:

1) Install it
2) Use it

If Windows becomes too slow, buy new hardware and repeat steps 1 and 2.

I'd add - if it becomes too slow Re-install it and repeat step 2, if that doesn't work then buy new hardware...

I always used to try and tweak each new Windows Install to perfection, but over time it felt like I was just making it take longer to set up without much benefit (and actualy discouraged me from just wiping and re-installing when windows really needed it), now I try and keep as close to the defaults as possible.
 
I'd add - if it becomes too slow Re-install it and repeat step 2, if that doesn't work then buy new hardware...

I always used to try and tweak each new Windows Install to perfection, but over time it felt like I was just making it take longer to set up without much benefit (and actualy discouraged me from just wiping and re-installing when windows really needed it), now I try and keep as close to the defaults as possible.

None of these will gain you performance it just recovers lost performance. 2 different things.

The above tweaks shows gains in performance Games,rendering & compression software on a freshly installed windows. Some of them are situations specific, some of them are general.
Just reinstalling windows will not get you those performance increase.
 
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None of these will gain you the performance it just recovers lost performance. 2 different things.
Like I said, I've only ever seen minimal benefit from tweaking, If I can maintain 'fresh' performance, that's enough for me.

I'm not knocking you for wanting to wring every last bit of performance out - this is [H] afterall - its just that in the past, there were lots of little tweaks that people knew about to give a decent boost, but between windows getting a lot more solid from 7 onwards, and SSD's becoming the norm as boot drives (which is the biggest factor I think, seriously F spinners), it's just not as common.
 
Like I said, I've only ever seen minimal benefit from tweaking, If I can maintain 'fresh' performance, that's enough for me.

I'm not knocking you for wanting to wring every last bit of performance out - this is [H] afterall - its just that in the past, there were lots of little tweaks that people knew about to give a decent boost, but between windows getting a lot more solid from 7 onwards, and SSD's becoming the norm as boot drives (which is the biggest factor I think, seriously F spinners), it's just not as common.

I agree. and there has been alost of tweaks that was plainly placebo. (hence looking for something that is benchmarksable".
Hell i still se sites advocate tweaks that was for win95 (cache size issues) for win7 or newer. not even knowing that the entries are not doing anything on any of the newer windows.

E.g. disabling Coreparking give a 15-25% boost in winrar and winzip.
or a 30% boost in performance for Cinbench. (if its only 4 threaded on a 4C8t CPU) by combining disabling coreparking and automatic setting affinity to avoid HT conflicts.

ofcause this is not going to help if your software is not CPU bottleneck.
 
Download and run this Simple System Tweaker
but instead of doing the tweaks press the ? beside the checkbox for each tweak so you can see what each tweak actually changes. Now investigate each tweak to see if there is any validity to them.
Post back your findings.
 
#13
Thank you y for your suggestion.

But sadly this is exactly the kind of tweaks om not interested in.
They are mostly just bad rumors, never benchmarked when they where floating the net and based on placebo observation and misunderstanding of how window works
Most of them has been disproved as having absolute no effect as the registry entries is never read by windows. or worse actually hurt performance.

There is some nice usability tweaks in it though but none of the performance related seems to have any bearing on actual empirical data.
e.g. disabling services. had no measurable impact in any test :(

Some of the visual tweaks are nice. ( the animations delays) but i already had those. some of them will hurt performance cause you are changing the GUI from HW to SW drawn.


But thank you for the effort.
 
E.g. disabling Coreparking give a 15-25% boost in winrar and winzip.
or a 30% boost in performance for Cinbench. (if its only 4 threaded on a 4C8t CPU) by combining disabling coreparking and automatic setting affinity to avoid HT conflicts.
I remember reading about disabling core parking (through registry tweak) to gain a bit of CPU performance back in Windows 7 era. Is this still the case with Windows 10 ??
 
I'd add - if it becomes too slow Re-install it and repeat step 2, if that doesn't work then buy new hardware...

I always used to try and tweak each new Windows Install to perfection, but over time it felt like I was just making it take longer to set up without much benefit (and actualy discouraged me from just wiping and re-installing when windows really needed it), now I try and keep as close to the defaults as possible.

Microsoft must have been spying on you, as reinstalling Windows 10 is simple as ever now with the option embedded in the OS, you don't even need to use an install disc/USB or change the boot order anymore!
 
I remember reading about disabling core parking (through registry tweak) to gain a bit of CPU performance back in Windows 7 era. Is this still the case with Windows 10 ??

Well Skylake system er at bit different in this regarfs but yes its still a decent performance boost under windows 10 on a pre skylake system. ( my 20% in Winrar and 7-zip was on a win10 i7 3770)

-- edit --
quick update.

i just used teamviewer to remote my home pc to make a quick and dirty benchmark under win10.

Compression output in 7-zip 32mb 2threads (since above 2 threads decrease overall compression ratio)

Core parking disabled:
9380
9682
9380
9481

Leaving Coreparking enabled:
8472
8683
8755
8637


(9481/8637) -1 = 9.77% improvement
 
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Tweaks were relevant at one time, and then came the age of SSDs and extremely high performance multi-core CPUs and, well, tweaks for the most part don't really matter all that much anymore and the fact that the OSes perform very well in a completely untouched "Leave it alone" state, thankfully.

I think with Windows 7 Pro in all the years I've been using it is the best OS Microsoft has ever created (no surprise there really) and for myself when I do a completely clean install on my own hardware the only tweak I bother with is setting a static 1GB page file on every physical drive, that's it. There's really nothing else that needs to be done and the OS just flies regardless of how long I use the given installation.
 
the only tweak I bother with is setting a static 1GB page file on every physical drive, that's it.
May I ask why?
I stick a static page file on my regular HDD, but that's only so I have one (some programs bitch) and it's not on the SSD.

Edit: Semi on topic: Most of the tweaking I do is just for usability, and disabling services I don't want/need running
 
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Tweaks were relevant at one time, and then came the age of SSDs and extremely high performance multi-core CPUs and, well, tweaks for the most part don't really matter all that much anymore and the fact that the OSes perform very well in a completely untouched "Leave it alone" state, thankfully.

I think with Windows 7 Pro in all the years I've been using it is the best OS Microsoft has ever created (no surprise there really) and for myself when I do a completely clean install on my own hardware the only tweak I bother with is setting a static 1GB page file on every physical drive, that's it. There's really nothing else that needs to be done and the OS just flies regardless of how long I use the given installation.

IMHO opinion tweak are still relevant when the provide 10-20% speed boost.
However most tweaks around have had absolute no effect and was mostly rumours. most of the tweaks form XP area was simply not doing anything.

There was always only very few tweaks that atcually did something. And i would even say that it more today then back at the XP time since we didn't have core parking back then, and everythingselse that shows measurable performance are the same from back then and now.

Its just that the entire tweak area is filled with nonsense,
 
I like tweaking the OS, from XP to Linux, but with 7 (can't comment on 8 or 10) there's really nothing cool to do.

I make sure the install is AHCI, I disable a few services I know I won't be using, or set their launch mode to delayed automatic instead of automatic. Do powercfg -h off to remove Hibernation.

If I'm on a spinner, I create a 10 Gig or so partition on the beginning of the drive, format it as FAT32 and create a page file on that partition.

If I'm on an SSD, I disable pre-loading of often used software - more free RAM and enough speed to load up programs quick enough.

Now, not to sound elitist but an SSD is a must. Anything post-Nehalem running its OS from a spinner is a waste.

I disable system restore on non-system partitions and set its quota to a small value. Sometimes I disable it altogether (if it's my rig).

I do disable IPv6 sometimes for potentially faster networking.

Apart from that, it's the occasional WinSXS purge with Disk Cleaner and CCleaner. Thankfully nothing else needs attention.
 
May I ask why?

I made a pretty thorough post in the recent past regarding why having a static page file 1GB in size on every physical drive you have in your system helps with smoother performance but I can't search for it now because the forum is under some maintenance. When search returns look around for that post and you'll get the answer, use my nickname and "page file" as search terms when it works and you'll find it.
 
Apart from that, it's the occasional WinSXS purge with Disk Cleaner and CCleaner. Thankfully nothing else needs attention.
In that case I'd mention cleaning out old video drivers from %SystemRoot%\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository
had close to 15gigs piling up from old Radeon drivers before I found out about that one.
(you'll need to "take ownership" of the folder before removing, you can google for a reg file to add context menuitems)
When search returns look around for that post and you'll get the answer, use my nickname and "page file" as search terms when it works and you'll find it.
I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
Edit: Google worked
 
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I was meaning this one actually:

A Better Way To Do The Windows Pagefile

Multiple posts in that thread which was about a better way to deal with or handle page files so, might prove more useful than that single post you tracked down, especially #62. :)
 
"6: Change system time ( no performance boost just a wanted feature)" - You can change system time both in bios and in windows time and date settings. What I am missing here about "wanted" future? I don't quite understand...
 
You don't really need to change much at all. And often times the 'tweaks' cause issues in the long run. For example, a few years ago when 7 was new A common tweak was to get rid of the 'useless' 100 or so meg partition that Windows created on a new install. That partition was actually for upgrades, so a lot of the windows 8 and 10 upgrade failures was because that partition was missing.

I'm willing to bet a lot of the patch and upgrade failures that people are having now are because of those anti spying programs and scripts that some people love to use. Some of them out right deleted services and components instead of just disabling them, which probably results in a unknown state when applying the updates. If you don't know what it's for and can't find anything reasonable on it or it outright deletes things it's a shit program and you'll pay for it eventually.
 
"6: Change system time ( no performance boost just a wanted feature)" - You can change system time both in bios and in windows time and date settings. What I am missing here about "wanted" future? I don't quite understand...

Sorry for late response.

I meant to write "System Timer" decreasing the time interval for the system timer certain time measurements becomes more correct but also CPU usage increase slightly.
its not a performance boost of anykind but somebody needed the function to avoid having multiple tools running.
 
Now that I saw this thread again it seems I lied a bit. I did tweak windows when I used to use it in a small but significant way: I reduced the menu response time from 400ms to 5ms. Even though nothing was gained in performance it makes the menus ultimately more usable when they respond near instantly.
 
Now that I saw this thread again it seems I lied a bit. I did tweak windows when I used to use it in a small but significant way: I reduced the menu response time from 400ms to 5ms. Even though nothing was gained in performance it makes the menus ultimately more usable when they respond near instantly.

I can't live with the 400ms menu time.
i actually used to remove it on computer I've serviced liek removing virus. so many gave feedback that their system was a lot faster now. perception is a fickle thing :D
 
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