Oct 10
Tweaking Windows Vista
This page is for comments and feedback for the article Tweaking Windows Vista – A guide to Tweak & Optimize Vista.
Please, lets keep this both civil and pertinent to the article. To further that aim I’ll save some of you the time:
#1 Vista Tweak – “format c:”, “install / reinstall / upgrade to Windows XP”, “use Linux”, “use a Mac”.
Ok, there, now that we’ve got that out of the way…
This page is NOT for:
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-Bashing of: Vista, Microsoft, individuals (including me), or anything else. It serves no purpose.
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-Questions, and/or comments not specific to tweaking Vista.
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Any comment violating these conditions or the ones below will be deleted.
I very much want your input and feedback. If you get a tweak from another site please provide that info so that I can give credit where credit is due.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for the continued work on the awesome XP and Vista tweaking guides. They sure have come in handy!
About the Disable Auto-Tuning tweak. I tried it and my bittorrent downloads got faster but my network connection got slower and so did regular downloads. Now I keep those commands in a notepad file and only use the tweak when I am downloading torrents.
October 11th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Nice solution!
October 11th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Thanks for putting forth some information regarding the disk thrashing issue. What methods do you suggest to disable the Readyboost and Superfetch?
October 12th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
I do not recommend disabling Superfetch. I only recommend disabling ReadyBoost if you cannot take advantage of it. This advice is already in the guide.
October 14th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Good guide! One small inaccuracy, though, in the list of Services:
“Computer Browser – Automatic – keeps a list of active computers on your net, it is not needed for browsing the net but can make it snappier.”
That description is about 80% correct, but your conclusion is a little off. This service is useless, and in fact a hindrance, to anybody who isn’t a member of a Windows domain. In other words: if you’re not a corporate user, turn it off. And if you ARE a corporate user, turn it off unless your machine is a server. Having more than one or two machines on a network running this service can (under certain circumstances) lead to intermittent network outages that are maddeningly hard to diagnose.
What it does is to tell your computer to participate in “elections” for the dubious honor of serving as Master Browser – in other words, the computer responsible for maintaining the directory of computers on your NTLM (NT LanManager) network. Elections happen any time any of the computers on the network is unable to contact the current Master Browser, and they can take up to a second if there are multiple “candidates”. So: make sure there are only one or two “candidates” available, and make sure that whichever machine ends up being “elected” is STABLE, so that elections don’t happen very often. Once again, bottom line: turn this service OFF except on servers.
October 14th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I’m a little confused on how you came up with the 80% correct part…
-First, I’m trying to write a short and sweet description that the novice can understand. I mean I know it has been a few years but last time I read a short description of the service it was a page long.
-RE: “useless” & “turn off”. You must be an IT guy (I am or rather was too…) because I would agree with your description 100% if we were talking about an office setup. But we aren’t because I say repeatedly in this guide that it isn’t for those situations. We are looking at home environments that is usually 1-4 computers and can be a mix of win98-Vista. Master Browser issues shouldn’t be a problem here (although, thinking about it, the Browser service might just cause issues with pre-XP computers…). I run 5-7 computers at my home and have for years (currently various flavors of Linux, my wifes Mac from school, Windows Server (2k3 at the moment), Vista, and XP. I specifically keep the Computer Browser service running because the server machine isn’t always on and I will not let the Linux boxes be part of the election process (screws up the network ) but that is another story.
Otherwise, I would not use Computer Browser service.
Anywho…
Because I can’t see what is on everyones network, and I have to read the letters about folks blaming me for their net not working, I have to leave the recommendations as is.
For those curious enough to read this you are probably savvy enough to follow Marc’s recommendation.
October 15th, 2007 at 12:09 am
In reply to your “I must confess I’ve never understood the fascination with searching or search tools. The better solution is to organize your data from the start.” comment:
If you say so, this means that you’re not dealing with thousands of files spreaded among several years on a regular basis. I am a scientist, and I have thousand of files composed of Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and image files, not to mention hundreds of scientific articles in PDF format. I have an extremely well working self-indexing scheme, organizing my files into folders in an OCD manner, but when you know what you want, but you do not know in which file is what you’re looking for, search is indispensible, making one’s file significantly easier. BTW, I’m not very fond of Vista search. I used to use Copernic Desktop Search in my old XP machine, and it was simply fantastic. I may give it a go under Vista, too, if I can effectively disable the Vista’s own indexing (I do not want two indexers running in the background). So, now you know who uses search, and why. Regards.
October 15th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
How’s this for a refinement – turn it off on any machine that moves from network to network (notebook or LAN party box), or on any machine that get restarted often, shut down overnight, or goes to sleep. Leave it running only on machines that are “up” more or less constantly.
I wouldn’t be so insistent about this, except that it bit me HARD once. I work mostly with doctor’s offices, and a growing number of them carry notebooks/tablets from room to room. Before I got into the habit of turning off the Computer Browser service on the notebooks, one of my clients was plagued by frequent, unexplained network interruptions, resulting in frequent crashes of their practice management software. What was happening was that one or another of the tablets was winning the election. When, later on, the tablet went to sleep, another election was forced.
I realize that, according to Microsoft’s specification, the server (running Windows Server 2003) should have been the winner every time – I suspect that the software application they’re running (I’m the IT guy, I didn’t write their program!) may be interfering somehow. Whatever. All I know is that as soon as I turned off the CB service everywhere but the server, I became a hero. Now I do it as a matter of course, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a quiet life.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I should explain that elections should theoretically be over in milliseconds, and there should never actually be an interruption in service that’s long enough for applications to notice. If some of the candidates are wireless, however, the election can last much longer, and hilarity ensues…
October 21st, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Just writing about superfetch here. I’ve got a bit of a hit or miss with this one. From what I can gather with superfetch is that it’s great when you use a lot of applications that aren’t using all of your available ram for each of themselves.
Yes, it’s true you will see a boost when things work in the background and stuff gets reloaded into memory, but from what I can tell it’s actually bad to have this on when you use applications that use enormous chunks of your ram, such as gaming.
Think of it this way:
2G of system ram.
Vista using 1G for itself, uses other 1G for superfetch.
Game wants 1.5G of ram
Vista has to dump superfetch and itself into the disk cache to free up ram for the game.
This process generates extra writes when loading applications that use up that entire amount of ram. What it does speed up is if you are using Office/browsers/IM clients/small apps over the course of time.
So really it’s a matter of this:
If you want faster overall system usage, Superfetch is good. If you want all of your speed dedicated to one main app here or there (gaming), you might want to turn it off.
Simple answer to this is just buy more ram so it won’t matter.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Incredible! Thank you for efforts and time. I have Vista and made quite a few tweaks already after running the OS for a month now. Your article was a great resource to double check my own adjustments.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Noticed that in Vista by default all drives are hidden administrative shares, if you want to turn these of create the following registry entries
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters
Name: AutoShareServer
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters
Name: AutoShareWks
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0
December 9th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Dee, that has been around since NT4:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288164
December 18th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Hey, nice job on the guide! That must be a lot of work to do.
I keep hearing about disabling the UAC file virtualization driver (under the Services key but not displayed in the SCM) when you also disable UAC to get faster boot times, as it still keeps loading even when one disabled UAC already. I don’t know if this tweak really works, but people do swear by them.
http://chris123nt.com/2007/11/27/vistas-uac-failing-once-again/
http://chris123nt.com/2007/11/28/how-to-disable-luafv-driver/
http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=44415
http://keznews.com/3854_Disabling_UAC_Slows_Vista_s_Bootup_Time_
Merry Christmas Eric!
February 17th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Hey first off I would like to say that you have done a splended job by making this resource. I would like to just just give out some information about the “Block Level Backup Engine Service”.
Quote from “http://itsvista.com/2007/03/block-level-backup-engine/”
Used by the Backup and Restore Center Control Panel, the Block Level Backup Engine service allows for a Complete PC backup at the block level of a disk, instead of file by file (not available on the home versions). This is often referred to as an image of the disk (or partition). If you don’t plan on using the Backup and Restore Complete PC feature then you won’t need this service, though because it is set to manual by default, it doesn’t use any system resources, so you won’t gain anything by disabling it.
Display Name:Block Level Backup Engine
Service Name:wbengine
Process Name:wbengine.exe
Description:Engine to perform block level backup and recovery of data.
Path to Executable:%windir%\system32\wbengine.exe
Default Startup:Home Basic: N/A
Home Premium: N/A
Business: Manual
Enterprise: Manual
Ultimate: Manual
Log On As:Local System Account Desktop Interaction:No, Depends On:None, Required For:None, Memory:N/A, CPU:N/A
I have also looked into otuer sites about this and they give the same description.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Does ready boost still provide a benefit when you have >4Gb of high speed RAM?
Does having a 64bit operating system change any of the tweaks you recommended?
Thanks, great guide. I trust it more than any other because it is the only one that focuses on backing up data (esp. cloning).
March 30th, 2008 at 11:26 am
ReadyBoost as a Service, yes.
ReadyBoost as in the drive. Debatable as to whether or not you’ll feel the difference. Some say Yes, some say No. The only way to tell is to try it yourself.
Guide is good for 64-bit too.
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Still searching your site, but need a tweak to keep vista (or is defragger, or windows defender) from changing my setups for window settings. i.e. I setup a window to display either detailed view, icon view etc, and sorting and size of window but window keeps changing it later and I am not sure which program or system maintainance is doing it.
Russ