[Bluefire101]

Making Vista boot off of all the processor cores (For people with Dual and Quad core processors).

Allright, Vista, when booting up it only uses one core. To make it boot off all the cores (2 if dual 4 if quad).
When Vista boots up hold the Windows key and R key down.

When the Run menu comes up, type in "msconfig" (without quotes)

Spoiler!

When the msconfig menu comes up, click on the tab called boot.

Spoiler!

Click on the tab called Advanced Options

Now a little window should pop up.

Look for a checkbox labeled "Number of Processors" and check that box.

A drop-down menu should be available now, click it and choose the biggest number that appears (2 if on Dual and 4 if on Quad)
After you've chosen the max amount of cores you have, hit OK and then hit Apply. Now when you restart or boot up your PC it should be considerably faster.


Speeding up USB External Harddrives

Write-caching is what would speed it up. Write-caching isnt enabled by default for externals. To enable it, follow this:

Go to the Control Panel (Start Menu > Control Panel or open the run menu and type control and hit enter). In the Control Panel, hit the icon called Device Manager.

When Device Manager comes up, look for a category called Disk Drives.

In that category, find your External harddrive. Right-click on it and hit properties. On the properties menu, hit the tab called Policies.

Change the setting called Optimize for Performance and hit OK.

Reboot your PC for the changes to take effect and there you go =).



Speeding up SATA Harddrives

SATA (also known as Serial ATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) Is the successor to ATA. It has faster data transfer (up to 6 gigabits per second depending on the specification you can get a max of 1.5 Gbit/s, 3 Gbit/s or 6 Gbit/s). and has thinner cables than ATA or IDE.

To enable the features of an SATA harddrive, go to the Device Manager and back to the category called Disk Drives.

Find your SATA drive and right-click on it and hit Properties

Go to the Policies tab and check the box for Enable Advanced Options (and Enable Write-Caching if its not enabled). and hit OK and reboot your PC and there you go =)



Run a harddrive defragmentation.

Over time files get fragmented on the harddrive, this can make your computer sluggish, especially if its some of the system files that are fragmented.

To run a defragmentation, open the Run menu and type in dfrgui and hit enter.

The defragmentation prompt should show up. Just hit Defragment Now... and it will run a defragmentation on your computer. Or if you don't want to run one now but sometime later, then you can also schedule a defragmentation as well.


Uninstall old uneeded programs.

Simply put, get rid of programs you no longer ever use.


Turn off Windows Search Indexing

If you don't do a lot of searches for files on your PC then chances are you won't need the Indexing a lot. The indexer basically checks your files constantly so when you search for them they show up quickly. But nothing that convenient comes for free. It puts some wear and tear on the performance. To disable it:

Click Start then Computer

Right Click the C: Drive

On General Tab, Uncheck Index this drive for faster searching

On the subsequent dialog box, Select Include subfolders and files

and there you go.


Disabling 8.3 name creation

8.3 Naming was what DOS (imagine command prompt as an OS essentially and there you go) and Windows 3.1 (Click Here for a picture of it) is the method they used to name files. This method has not been necessary since Windows 95 was out. So in other words unless you want to use a 16-bit DOS based application, you don't need this enabled.

Open the Run menu and type regedit in there

*post note*

BE VERY DAMN CAREFUL WHEN USING REGEDIT, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS EXTREMELY PRECISELY FROM HERE ON.

*end post not*

Once regedit pops up. Follow this HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\FileSystem

Once you click on FileSystem you should see a key (registry file) called "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"

Double click on it and you should see the number 0 in a little text box. Change this to one and hit OK and there you go =)

STAY IN THAT DIRECTORY YOU NEED IT FOR THE NEXT TWEAK.

Speeding up Windows Vista by disabling the last access stamp.

By default, any Windows installation that is using the NTFS file system (that is, almost any installation of Windows 2000 or later) updates each file with a date stamp every time it is accessed. You don't really need Windows to update the file when it was last accessed to save some wear and tear on vista.

If you followed the bold letters in the last tweak you should be still in that directory in regedit. If not, then go back to there again.

In the directory there should be a key called "NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"Double click it and change the number zero to one and hit OK.


If there is not a key in there called that then you will have to make it.

Right click in the window where all the keys are and go New > DWORD (32 bit) Value.

A new key should appear. Name it NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and hit enter.

Now double click it and change the value from zero to one.

There you go ^^



Making a self managed Page File

Go to the Control Panel and double-click on the icon labeled System

When the window pops up, click on Advanced System Settings on the left side of the window.

A smaller window will appear. Click on the tab called Advanced and then hit the button called Settings... under Performance

Another window will open. Click on the tab in that window called Advanced. Now there should be Two little boxes in there called Processor Scheduling and Virtual Memory.

Go to the Virtual memory box and hit the button called Change...

Another Window will open.

If the box labeled "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" is checked. Go ahead and uncheck it.

Then click the one called Custom Size

Enter 512 and 512 in both boxes and then hit Set.

Then hit OK and then hit Apply

there you go =)


How To Locate And Correct Disk Space Problems

Just read this Knowledge Base article by Microsoft.

[Only registered users can see links. ]


Forcing Windows Kernel and System Code To Stay Loaded In The Memory To Speed Vista Up. (For People with 1GB+ RAM)

Windows usually pages the kernel etc to the disk. This however can be extremely slow at some points. If you have a lot of ram (1GB and up) You can force the kernel and system to stay loaded in the memory, this makes it faster because Windows can directly take it from the memory instead of having to search the harddrive for the files it needs.

Open the Run Menu and type Regedit in and hit enter.

Navigate to this directory HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\ And click on Memory Management.

Inside the Memory Management directory there should be a key called "DisablePagingExecutive".

Double click on that key and change the zero to a one
Now Windows Vista's kernel and system are paged to the memory.


Forcing Windows To Unload Uneeded DLL's from the RAM

Windows Explorer caches extensions DLLs (Dynamic-Link Libraries) in memory for a period of time after the application that using them has been closed or exited. Windows Shell automatically unloads a DLL when its usage count is zero, but only after the DLL has not been used for a period of time. On low memory systems, the behavior will contribute to system slowness and delays with lesser available physical memory, and cause inefficient use of memory especially when debugging or developing Windows DLL files.

Open Regedit

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion and click on Explorer

Right-click the window where all the keys are and go New > DWORD (32-Bit) Value

Name it AlwaysUnloadDLL and hit enter. Then double click on it and change the zero to a one


Last Thoughts...

Don t run 32 bit programs in a 64 bit OS as they will force windows to do additional branching at process switching which slows things down, and the 32 bit software cannot reliably be wrapped to work with 64 bit libraries (ie. drivers).


Well thats all for this tutorial. I hope it helps some of you out ^^

[xibo]

Windows Update KB955302 Patchset ( released 2008-09-08 ) speeds up some networking things, especially IPSec and IPv6 networking.

Summary:

• Fixes Bug ( 64 Bit Systems only ) in DirectX Context delocation, which also
• Fixes Flight Simulator X Crashes
  
• Speeds up Wireless network detection
• Speeds up DHCP requests
• Speeds up NetBios requests
• Speeds up socket connection requests
• Speeds up socket packet encrytion
• Speeds up socket packet decryption
  
• New: Disk Cleanup Tool reads it's settings from file now instead of the system registry, and auto-define unset values ( fixes corrupted behaviour )
• New: Vista will not try to autoconnect to the pre-sleep connected wireless network after resuming from sleep mode

Full description ( horrible translation warning ) : [Only registered users can see links. ]

EDIT: eventually there are more fixes or speedups but these are those that got measured ( not by me )

[nymphe]

i disabled windows defender, but now everytime i boot up my computer it comes up with an error message telling me that windows defender is off. is there any way to disable windows defender and tell vista that it's SUPPOSED to be off?

[xibo]

i turned mine off and vista isn t moaning around. i didn t have to do anything for it

[uchiha90]

does this work? has anyone tried?

[Coldash]

Great tutorials! Thanks!

[mrsir]

good tutorial +rep

when i bought my laptop i was worried about vista being slow and bulky so i decided to use windows server 2008 instead... and i have to say, its working pretty well for me. theres a good tutorial website: win2008workstation.com/ that walks you through more or less everything

oh and, msft recently made winserver08 free for all students so... =D