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General discussion

Are there any other ways to speed up vista besides these?

by Rammstein420 Aug 13, 2008 2:53AM PDT

I changed services, installed a 4GB flash drive for ReadyBoost and optimized it for performance, I optimized my hard drive for performance enabled write caching on it and enabled advanced performance, I turned off all but one of the windows features, compacted the files I did not need, Adjusted the power setting to High Performance,Took off abunch of visual effects, Set virtual memory to Initial Size: 7500 Maximum: 10,000. I did more than that but don't remember what I did.
So what else is there to do?

Discussion is locked

6 Posts
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Widely discussed but...
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 13, 2008 3:19AM PDT

The real fix for me was to max out the RAM as I found ready boost to only help in low RAM machines. Also the flash memory gets slower as it ages so the initial speed vanishes in just a few months.

Then again you have those that won't upgrade RAM or hard disks.

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yea but
by Rammstein420 Aug 13, 2008 3:22AM PDT

I am maxed at 4 gigs ram though Sad

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Then ready boost
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 13, 2008 3:28AM PDT

There are web pages about ready boost on that much ram. At this point it's likely to be a sluggish hard disk or "other." Let's look at the PC in question. Oops. Where is it?

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So I should take it out?
by Rammstein420 Aug 13, 2008 5:41AM PDT

if it slows it down i might as well.

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(NT) I think you should get a stopwatch.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 13, 2008 5:44AM PDT
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Yes
by Jimmy Greystone Aug 13, 2008 4:15AM PDT

A few other tweaks you can research on your own

* Disabling the Windows Search service
* Altering the behavior of the Windows cache manager
* Telling Vista to use all cores on a multi-core CPU during bootup. Supposedly Vista does this already, and it's just a debugging option, but I did notice a very slight improvement in my bootup speed after enabling it. Basically from the time you see the stupid little Windows logo that starts glowing to the time you see the desktop, had a couple of seconds shaved off in my case. Nothing spectacular to be sure, but something.

Setting upper and lower limits on swap file size will not improve performance at all, in fact it will likely have the OPPOSITE effect if it ever happens that you need more swap space. The ONLY thing that will improve swapfile performance, is putting it on a separate physical drive, not just another partition.

ReadyBoost is really just a stopgap solution for needing more RAM. If you want to be able to have more than 4GB of RAM in a system, then get yourself a copy of Vista x64, otherwise learn to live with it as it is. Flash drives have a finite lifespan, and sooner or later that drive will start to fail and you'll have to replace it. RAM, OTOH, may still have a finite lifespan but it's effectively infinitely longer than flash drives.

In general though, there are only about three things that will ever speed up a computer to any significant degree.

1: A faster CPU
2: More RAM
3: Limiting the number of running programs

You can go along and tweak this and that to get maybe another 0.1% performance improvement, but you're never going to get very far with it because the CPU can only process things at some fixed rate, and the RAM has a finite capacity, which will always be limiting factors.

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