Windows 7 tweaks - except for SSD

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x509

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There is another thread in this forum about Windows 7 tweaks specifically for SSDs.

As part of this thread, I posted a question about Windows 7 tweaks in general, but no one seemed to notice. So on the advice of someone else, I'm posting this as a separate thread.

What tweaks aside from SSD, e.g. your preferences for how and when new windows get opened up, like do you want all new windows to show icons instead of lists or details.

There are probably hundreds of these little tweaks, no one probably thinks abut them, but I hate having to reset all these little tweaks every time I build up a new system.

Are there any tools that allow you to capture all these tweaks, either as you make them or by somehow doing a "snapshot" your system.

Thanks.
 
While I have moved on past "tweaking" in general - and with XP I could get it under 80MB for the system to boot on most any system and it would boot from a hard drive in under 13 seconds (my record was 9.8 seconds on an old laptop, as measured with Bootvis) - if I had to point you to a source of solid useful tweaks, it would probably be this:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

The basic "free" Windows 7 tweak guide is 426 pages - that guy writes stuff like I do, excessively wordy but we both do it for the same reasons: we don't want people coming back at us saying "Well you didn't tell me that..." - and if you can't get your machine up and running the way you want with 426 pages of info, turn off the computer and go out for a walk. :)

For myself, after a clean installation of Windows 7 Professional (my edition of choice), I will:

- alter the page file to 1GB static (1024MB minimum/1024MB maximum)
- create a 1GB RAMdisk and use R: for the drive letter and RAMdisk for the label with a backup image on the system drive (for saving the contents between reboots, also saved every 5 minutes during normal operation)
- assign all temp/tmp system variables to the RAMdisk including the IE9 browser cache (much faster that way since RAM rules all)
- disable hibernation (I use sleep/standby more often, this laptop has not been "turned off" for more than a reboot in 2 years)
- disable System Restore (I do daily backups with True Image of the entire 40GB system partition)
- alter the Desktop color to my liking (dark grey, matching Taskbar)
- alter the window borders to 0 pixel (Border Padding)
- install WinRAR (My preferred compression app, always will be)
- start putting my portable apps (about 25) on the RAMdisk, including Firefox 5 and many others (they run directly from RAM for the best possible performance from all of them, and all data is cached directly on the RAMdisk also)

And that's pretty much it. I'm still using a plain old platter-spinning physical hard drive, but if I had an SSD, the only alteration to that would be... well... nothing, actually. Seriously, there's nothing else I'd do just because I would have an SSD, but I'd most likely use the current 320GB hard drive I have internally as a secondary external USB drive and slap a 1GB page file on it for improved system efficiency and multitasking, but the primary page file would still reside on the SSD.

YMMV, as always...

As for making some "snapshot" well, you're not going to make a snapshot of the whole tweaking process, no, but you can do a clean installation, tweak it as you prefer, then make a snapshot aka image of the system partition at that point and save it. That's what software like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, Clonezilla, DriveImage XML, and others are for: make a bit-for-bit perfect backup of the entire partition so you can "start over" again anytime you want in a matter of minutes (time to restore the image) without having to spend hours redoing all that tweaking.
 
Joe Average said:
While I have moved on past "tweaking" in general - and with XP I could get it under 80MB for the system to boot on most any system and it would boot from a hard drive in under 13 seconds (my record was 9.8 seconds on an old laptop, as measured with Bootvis) - if I had to point you to a source of solid useful tweaks, it would probably be this:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

The basic "free" Windows 7 tweak guide is 426 pages - that guy writes stuff like I do, excessively wordy but we both do it for the same reasons: we don't want people coming back at us saying "Well you didn't tell me that..." - and if you can't get your machine up and running the way you want with 426 pages of info, turn off the computer and go out for a walk. :)

For myself, after a clean installation of Windows 7 Professional (my edition of choice), I will:

- alter the page file to 1GB static (1024MB minimum/1024MB maximum)
- create a 1GB RAMdisk and use R: for the drive letter and RAMdisk for the label with a backup image on the system drive (for saving the contents between reboots, also saved every 5 minutes during normal operation)
- assign all temp/tmp system variables to the RAMdisk including the IE9 browser cache (much faster that way since RAM rules all)
- disable hibernation (I use sleep/standby more often, this laptop has not been "turned off" for more than a reboot in 2 years)
- disable System Restore (I do daily backups with True Image of the entire 40GB system partition)
- alter the Desktop color to my liking (dark grey, matching Taskbar)
- alter the window borders to 0 pixel (Border Padding)
- install WinRAR (My preferred compression app, always will be)
- start putting my portable apps (about 25) on the RAMdisk, including Firefox 5 and many others (they run directly from RAM for the best possible performance from all of them, and all data is cached directly on the RAMdisk also)

And that's pretty much it. I'm still using a plain old platter-spinning physical hard drive, but if I had an SSD, the only alteration to that would be... well... nothing, actually. Seriously, there's nothing else I'd do just because I would have an SSD, but I'd most likely use the current 320GB hard drive I have internally as a secondary external USB drive and slap a 1GB page file on it for improved system efficiency and multitasking, but the primary page file would still reside on the SSD.

YMMV, as always...

As for making some "snapshot" well, you're not going to make a snapshot of the whole tweaking process, no, but you can do a clean installation, tweak it as you prefer, then make a snapshot aka image of the system partition at that point and save it. That's what software like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, Clonezilla, DriveImage XML, and others are for: make a bit-for-bit perfect backup of the entire partition so you can "start over" again anytime you want in a matter of minutes (time to restore the image) without having to spend hours redoing all that tweaking.
Click to expand...

Joe Average,

Thanks for this reply. I can't imagine reading 426 pages of anything, unless it's "War and Peace," and that was written about a country, not an OS. :D

For me the issue is that the different systems in my home network aren't identical. A mixture of desktops and laptops, no two the same. So my preferred approach is to do a clean Win install on each system (as needed of course) and then apply this humongous "tweaks script," probably meaning a large number of regedit statements.

So are there tools that can create that tweaks script?

Thanks.
 
x509 said:
Joe Average,

Thanks for this reply. I can't imagine reading 426 pages of anything, unless it's "War and Peace," and that was written about a country, not an OS. :D

For me the issue is that the different systems in my home network aren't identical. A mixture of desktops and laptops, no two the same. So my preferred approach is to do a clean Win install on each system (as needed of course) and then apply this humongous "tweaks script," probably meaning a large number of regedit statements.

So are there tools that can create that tweaks script?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Again, leave it alone, if your systems can handle windows 7, there is really nothing to tweak, this is not Windows 2000 or Windows XP, so dont treat it as such.
 
You answered your own question.

Question:

x509 said:
So my preferred approach is to do a clean Win install on each system (as needed of course) and then apply this humongous "tweaks script," probably meaning a large number of regedit statements.

So are there tools that can create that tweaks script?
Click to expand...

Answer:

x509 said:
the issue is that the different systems in my home network aren't identical. A mixture of desktops and laptops, no two the same.
Click to expand...

A "tweaks script" you develop on one of your systems will break the others because they're not the same. You'll have to customize the script for each system. You would spend more time customizing the tweak script than you would just tweaking each system manually.

The real solution to this is to make each system the same as the other, or at least reduce the number of different system configurations to a minimum. This is how large corporations deal with hundreds or thousands of systems; they make them as similar as possible, rather than trying to create some monstrous tweak script.
 
- install WinRAR (My preferred compression app, always will be)

How is that a tweak? That is just a personal preference, I prefer 7zip so the OP should use that. ;)
 
I used to tweak for hours and hours back on XP and older but Win 7 I have a hard time justifying anything.
 
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