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 How To Make Vista Start, Run and Shutdown Faster. |
While the discussion pertains to Windows Vista particularly, the same applies to Windows in general too ! For a general user 1, 2, 3, 17 are usually more than sufficient to make your Vista faster. The remaining are some more which a tweak enthusiast may wish to consider. Utilities like WinPatrol or Tune-Up Utilities can help you in most of the cases.
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| 1. Restrict the number of start-ups. Why have programs starting up when you don't really use them. Even those you use can always be started manually by clicking on the. I personally prefer not to have ANY startups. So decide for yourself which one's you really need as start-ups. Do also remove any pre-installed crapware which may have come pre-installed on your new Vista machine, as many a time its these craplets that cause a machine to crawl ! |
| One small and simple tip ! Restart your PC at least once a week, especially if you use it a lot. Restarting a PC is a good way to clear out its memory and ensuring that any errant processes and services that started running get shut down. |
| 2. Windows Vista has around 130 services installed ! Disable services which one may not require. For example, if your pc is a stand-alone one, there may be several services which you can disable or switch over to manual mode. Auto-starting and closing down of services takes time & resources. These can be saved. BlackViper's Vista Service Configurations is an excellent guide to follow. |
3. Reducing visual effects (eye candy).
Right-click on “My Computer” > Properties > Advanced > Performance-Settings > Visual Effects > Adjust for best performance > Apply > OK.
To allow the themes and the glass effects, you may have to check on the boxes : enable transparent glass and use visual styles; this way atleast the spirit of Vista will be preserved- else be prepared for a really bland Vista ! Use your discretion. I know disabling all can actually negate the purpose of 'eye-friendly' Vista. |
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4. Ensure that boot defragmentation is enabled, so that files used during start-up are clubbed together.
Start Regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Dfrg\ BootOptimizeFunction . Select Enable from the list on the right.
Right Click on it and select Modify. Change the value to Y to enable and N to disable. Reboot. |
5. Disable : "clear page file on shutdown" option, if enabled. Cleaning the page-file on every shutdown means overwriting the data by zeros, and it takes time.
To clear/not clear page file you can apply this reg tweak. Back up registry before trying this. Start > Run > Regedit
GotoHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Session Manager\ Memory Management
Modify (if not present, rt click in open space and create) the Value Data Type/s and Value Name/s :
Data Type: REG_DWORD [Dword Value]
Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown
Setting for Value Data: [0 = Clear Page File Disabled / 1 = Clear Page File Enabled]
Exit Registry and Reboot. |
| 6. Defragment your System Disk & Fine Tune your Registry. If you find the Vista's in-built defragger slow, you can try freeware Auslogics Disk Defrag which works on Vista too ! Use the freeware CCleaner to clear up your PC Junk and clean up the Registry. Compacting the Registry occasionally is a good idea too ! |
| 7. Generally people also recommend emptying the Prefetch directory once in a while. But Windows uses this directory to speed up launching
applications. It analyzes the files you use during startup and the applications you launch, and it creates an index to where those files and applications are located on your hard disk. Using this index, Windows can launch files and applications faster. Utilities like CCleaner too have an option to clear the prefetcher. Should you choose to use this option of 'clearing prefetcher', be ready to run an 'un-optimized' windows for a little while. The Prefetcher is best left alone ! In any case, Windows cleans it at 128 entries down to the 32 most used application's prefetch files. |
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| 8. Go to BIOS settings, by pressing Del key during boot-up, and disable 'seek floppy drive' option. This saves time for those who do not use floppy drives. There are also some BIOS hacks like Enabling Quick Post, Disabling Boot Delay, etc but best to refrain from these. |
| 9. Change Boot-Order Sequence : Normally, the Bios is set to boot from floppy first, then CD and then Hard Disk. Changing the Boot-Order to be: Hard Disk first, then maybe CD/Floppy, could possibly "shave" a second, I guess ! |
10. Disable windows startup/shutdown/logon/logoff sounds. Go to control panel, sounds & audio devices, sound tab, in program events select 'no sound' for these events. |
| 11. Disable the ScreenSaver if you don't need it. Rt-Click desktop > ScreenSaver > None > OK. Useful esp if have any tasks running in the background. |
| 12. Fonts take time to load. Removing some can save on resources. But one must be careful in deciding which fonts to remove. If you delete some system fonts, you may b in for trouble. Tweak VI Pro is a good shareware to manage fonts. It uninstall's fonts without physically removing them. Open its help file. It lists down the system fonts which must not be deleted ! use the list; and then decide what to delete and what to keep. |
| 13. To REALLY reduce your shutdown time.
Start Regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/ SYSTEM/ CurrentControlSet/ Control.
Click on the "Control" Folder. Select "WaitToKillServiceTimeout"
Right click on it and select Modify. the default value is 20000.
Setting it to a lower 4 digit value,( say 5000) will make your PC shutdown faster, but you could end up losing data, so use this tweak judiciously. Remember, Windows does not in any case, recognise a 3-digit numeral here. |
| 14. Get rid of all the extra programs Windows Vista installs. You may not be using some like WLM, Calculator, Games, Meeting Space, Fax, etc. Go To Control Panel\ Programs\ Programs and Features > Turn windows On or Off and do the needful. But wait, before you rush, exercise a little caution here ! For instance you may want to turn off "Tablet PC Components etc"; but then get set to miss the Clipping Tool too ! |
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| 15. Disable Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) : The Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) is a Microsoft Windows Vista operating system feature targeted at improving the user experience of connecting and disconnecting displays, particularly for the mobile user. |
| When you start Vista, you see a 2-3 sec delay followed by a blank black screen. This is the time Vista searches for external monitors. So if you dont use an external monitor, you could always safely turn this off! |
To do so, Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Schedular.
On LHS, expand "Task Scheduler Library" then expand "Microsoft", then expand "Windows" and finally click "MobilePC". You will see a task called "TMM". Rt-Click on it, and select "Disable". |
| 16. Go To Control Panel\System and Maintenance\Performance Information and Tools. On the LHS you will see options to Adjust Indexing options, visual effects, power Settings, etc. These all help directly and indirectly. |
17.  One of my favorite programs for XP was freeware DriverHeavens TuneXP 1.5, which had several uncommon tweaks. One rather useful one was "Ultra Fast Booting-Rearrange Files". I tried it on my 32 bit Vista Ultimate and was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked smoothly ! |
| Download it from the link given and install it. It will ask you to confirm on which disk your Windows is installed. Please do so. Then from the 'Memory & File Systems' tab, at the bottom you will see 'Ultra Fast Booting-Rearrange Files'. Click on it. You will get a windows, where you can see the progress. On its completion, a black windows will pop up. This process could well take upto 5 mins, so please be patient. Beneath this window, you will see a new small window asking you to, not re-start till the process is over'. Click OK and Wait ! |
| Rather than twiddling your thumb, open your Task Manager. You will see 2 of its processes: defrag.exe and dfrgntfs.exe. On completion of the job, a summary will appear in the black window; now you may close the black windows, and the 2 processes will disappear too. Re-start. I personally found a marked change in my boot time. By the way, I have not tried the other tweaks of TuneXP on Vista. |
| 18. The default power setting in the "Power Saver" plan limits the CPU to 50 percent. Open the Power Options control panel and change it to "High Performance" to give your CPU full throttle. |
Do remember that your Vista-based machine will tend to run a little faster, after the first few weeks after it's installed, thanks to its new feature called "SuperFetch" ; which basically studies the programs that the user frequently runs and loads them into memory automatically.
Happy Tweaking !
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 Ryan Wieser, a performance enthusiast, from USA, has added a few more of his own here : |
Turn off Indexing:
File Indexing in Vista along with previous versions of Windows still seems to be a resource hog. At first glance the indexing service (searchindexer.exe) takes 5-7MB of memory, is constantly creating excessive I/O tasks for your hard disk, and disabling indexing completely should also reduce Page File usage. First you must untick files to index under "Indexing Options" in the control panel, however the complete way to disable indexing would also involve going into your hard disk's properties and unticking the option "Index this drive for faster searching". Then you must go into Services.msc, disable and stop the "Windows Search" Service. So if you do much searching on your machine, this moght seem like a good idea ! |
Disable 8.3 filename creation:
The NFTS file system is set to automatically create a "short filename" for any file considered a "long filename" in Windows. This is done so files are compatible with old 16bit legacy applications. Microsoft admits the creation of 8.3 filenames can degrade your file system performance. To disable 8.3 filenames for future files you will need to open "regedit" and navigate to: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ FileSystem" and find the DWORD "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation" and set its value to 1.
To disable 8.3 filenames for existing files you will need to open a command prompt and type "fsutil.exe behavior set disable8dot3 1". Source: Microsoft.
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Stop ehtray.exe:
When you use Windows Media Center in Vista for the first time it will automatically add a background process to startup called "ehtray.exe". This startup entry cannot be simply unticked in msconfig or deleted and expected to never appear again. Once you start Media Center again it will create a duplicate entry regardless if the existing entry has been disabled or deleted. "ehtray.exe" is supposed to be a tray icon process for easy access to the "Digital Media Manager". This process is completely useless to me and uses memory. To prevent ehtray from running you can rename the file itself or delete it all together, which will not hamper Media Center functionality. In order to rename or delete this system file you must first take ownership and full control buy simply adding this context menu extension. The file is found under the C:\Windows\ehome directory. Simply rename it to ehtray.old or delete it after taking ownership. Source. |
Enable Direct Read and Write Cache:
By default Vista will write data to disk and then store the data in cache for better performance. You can change this behavior for even better performance by allowing your hard disk to skip writing data directly to your hard drive and rather just throw the data straight into cache. This will result in even better performance but there is a small risk. If your power goes out suddenly you will lose the data that had been written to cache and since the data has not been written to disk you may end up with lost files or even a corrupted Vista installation depending on what kind of data the hard disk had in cache. If you have a UPS then it should be perfectly safe to enable this setting. I do not have a UPS but the risk isn't big enough to me, so I enable this setting. To do so, simply go into device manager, look under your hard drive properties, click the policy tab, and tick "Enable advanced performance". |
Change your DNS servers:
Right now, your probably using your ISP's DNS servers to translate web addresses, which in most cases are slow. OpenDNS claims to have high speed DNS servers which in most cases are much more responsive than your ISP's servers. Try it out and see if you notice an improvement. |
Adjust your Page File:
The Page File is virtual memory stored on your hard disk and is constantly in use regardless of how much RAM you have. Disabling it is not a good idea unless you have 3-4GB of RAM in which case you can experiment. If you have two hard drives you can store the Page File on a separate disk away from your Windows installation which will improve performance. If your second drive is slower than the root drive then I would recommend keeping your Page File on the root drive. It is important to set your Page File large enough and make it a fixed size to prevent it from expanding which can cause performance loss. So it is important to set the "initial" and "maximum" size of the Page File the same and allow yourself to have more than enough room for paging.
RAM Initial and max size of Page File
512MB: You shouldn't be running Vista
1GB: 2048-2048mb
2GB: 1024-1024mb
3-4GB: 512-512mb or none if you want to experiment
You can resize the Page File as necessary. It doesn't matter how large it is. The only downside of a larger Page File is less disk space. Just be sure to keep it at a large fixed size. |
Improve general explorer performance:
This one is pretty self explanatory. Go into your root drive, click organize, point to layout, and untick the "Details Pane". The details pane seems to really slow down window responsiveness. Under the organize button click "Folder and Search Options". Under the "View" tab untick "Display file size information in folder tips" and "Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items". Then click "Apply to all folders" at the top of the Folder Option window to get rid of the Details pane on all folders. |
Make various menu's in Vista appear faster:
This was a popular tweak in XP to do away with the slow start-menu delay. Since Vista has a different start-menu this tweak would no longer apply to it but it still works on other various menu's in Vista that otherwise have a long delay when pausing over them. Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Change the "MenuShowDelay" string to a value of "20". You can set it as low as you want but I find "20" to be a good value. |
Services:
Personal preferences will dictate which you should consider disabling. This has already been touched upon above in the main writeup. There are various guides out there you can refer to in order to decide which services you can disable. I would recommend reading over all of them you can find for each service. Some guides have different idea's and better information than others. So it is important to come to a conclusion based on multiple opinions and suggestions. I would like to point out just a few things and leave the rest up to dedicated guides.
Automatic services you should set to Manual:
-Background Intelligent Transfer Service
-Cryptographic Services
-Security Center. If you want Security Center to continue bothering you then leave it on automatic.
-Windows Update. Do it only if you dont want to take advantage of automatic updates.
-If you don't use a printer then disable the "Print Spooler" service.
-If your not running a Tablet PC then disable the "Tablet PC Input" service.
-If you don't connect cameras, webcams, or scanners to your PC then disable the "Windows Image Acquisition" Service. |
| I wouldn't disable the "ReadyBoost" service even if you don't use it as "ReadyBoot" is integrated into this service so setting this service to manual or disable with slow down your boot time. |
 Daniel Hyam adds : Purely from a tweakers point of view, you can squeeze a little more performance out of your SATA hard disk drive by enabling write caching. But there is an increased risk for data corruption or loss, should you experience a power loss ! |
| To do so : Click on the Start Button, write Device Manager and click Enter. Then Expand the Disk Drives. Now Right-click on hard disk drive and select Properties. Here, on Policies, check on Enable Advanced Performance. Click OK. |
 Guy, a Dentist by profession, has this to add: What this Tip-17 regarding TuneXP, mentioned above does, is the equivalent of running “Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks” at a command prompt. It creates a new layout.ini file and reorders the boot files and programs files. As this happens every three days anyway, one need not do it, unless one uses a defragging program that can take over the layout of the files referenced in the prefetch folder. Then it is advantageous to have an up to date version of layout.ini. This applies to both XP and Vista. |
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These Links may Interest You:
Avoid Tweaks of Dubious Value.
Arresting Windows Rot ! |
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