8. Tweak your services
Well, this one is arguable. Many sites preach service tweaking as the end all of tweaks, and Vista does have a lot of services (like 130). However, a good portion of them are set to manual or disabled by default. Manual will only start the service when the operating system thinks it needs to use that program. However, Vista does have a lot of services set to Automatic by default that are not needed for many people. Granted, they are usually sleeping, not using any CPU, and if they use memory, they usually get paged out to disk pretty fast. But, regardless, it is fairly quick to do, and will gain you some improvement.
First off, how to tell what you should really be worried about. One new feature in Vista is the ‘Go to Service’ feature in Task Manager (or at least I never noticed it before). Open Task Manager, Processes tab, right click on a particularly heavy process, and select ‘Go to Service (s)’. This will jump you over to the services tab, and select all the services that are running under that process (multiple ones are usually running under svchost.exe, many of the others only map to one service).
It also works in reverse (select service, right click and go to process) I have something like 75 services running at this very moment. Many of them I have exactly zero use for. I do not have a printer, but print spooler is running and using a whole whopping 1MB of my ram at the moment. There are heavier examples, but even if you can remove 20 of these, is it worth your time? Well, yes and no. Like I said, many of them are already paged out, so they really aren’t affecting your system’s memory. There is added overhead because the scheduler still needs to manage them, but I cannot for the life of me remember how it is done in Windows.
Overall maybe minimal, but if you are going for every ounce of tweak-ness, give it a shot. I’d recommend Speedyvista look for their cheatsheet or registry files pages so you can keep a copy of the default services around for when/if you mess it up and need to get back to default.
9. How to find out the next area for improvement ? Tweak your programs
Well, you’ve gotten the operating system down to a certain point, what’s next? Well, figure out where your bottlenecks still are! There’s probably some software on your computer that just kills performance (or 6-7 of them). Don’t blame MS quite yet. Anyway, luckily for you Windows Vista has a simple tool included that can help you identify the problem and remedy it quickly.
- Open the task manager (many ways to get to it, easiest is ctrl+alt+delete then select Start Task Manager)
- Navigate to the Performance tab
- Click on Resource Monitor
- Expand the disk section and sort by either reads or writes column.
Additionally, you can check out cpu, memory usage and network usage in the same way. Now you will probably notice that your virus scanner is using 20x the resources of Aero, as it insists on scanning your RAM all the time, and scanning every damn file you read from, write to, or execute. But, what can you do? Try to find a couple programs that are too greedy, or running when they have no reason to be running (Example: itunes has a couple services installed that run constantly. Why? I’ve no idea why it takes 2-3 services running and several threads to just be looking out for when you just might plug in your ipod, because that functionality is already built into windows). Office also has a preloader ‘quick start’ service (as does open office) to make sure that things run ‘better’ for you. Even though you do have super fetch which should do it automatically without the need for any extra memory usage.
10. Not really a tweak but…
Ok, #10 isn’t really a speed tweak, but it’s something I’ve always found annoying on many operating systems. Many of us have 2 LCDs, and oh wouldn’t it be nice to be able to set different backgrounds for both? There are programs out there that do it, but here’s a way to just do it inside windows.
- Right click on the background and select Personalization.
- Click on Desktop Background
- Select a background image that is at least as wide as the combined resolution of both of your monitors (or scale the image up so it is big enough, else you will get tiling.. it takes some tweaking, so get out your photo editor of choice for this one.
- Select the Tile picture positioning option as shown below. This is the only option that will display your background image across multiple monitors
Alright, tune in next time for more advanced Windows Vista tweaks. If you have any questions doing any of the above, let me know, or if you wish to debate their usefulness, etc. If you wish to give your own, even better!
