Performance tweaking for Windows is often looked upon as some sort of black art where we get out the chickens and candles while chanting incantations to the computer gods. Over the years I have seem more bullshit propagated about things you can to do to make your copy of Windows run better. Most of the time those great tips either did very little to improve performance or in some case could even cause more problems.
The folks over at Lifehacker feel pretty much the same and their How To Geek has put together a list of some of the more questionable tweaks that have gained popularity over the years. I’ll just outline them here so make sure to check the full list at Lifehacker.
Free up 20% of your bandwidth by disabling QoS
As Lifehacker quotes Microsoft’s take on this in their section on this tweak
"There have been claims in various published technical articles and newsgroup postings that Windows XP always reserves 20 percent of the available bandwidth for QoS. These claims are incorrect… One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth."
Speed up Vista’s boot up by making it use multiple cores
Apparently this one caught more than a few tech writers at both Lifehacker and Gizmodo only to be corrected by commenter’s at both blogs. The tip – and the facts – goes something like this
According to this tip, you were supposed to use MS Config to modify the "Number of processors" drop-down on the Boot tab. The problem is that this setting is only used for troubleshooting and debugging, to be able to determine if there is a problem with a single processor, or for a programmer to test their code against a single core while running on a multi-core system. Windows will use all your processors by default without this setting.
A cleaned out Windows Prefetch will give you a faster startup
Gawd I can’t count the number of times I have seen this one float by as well as having it debunked by our own WinExtra Community Forum members. If you don’t trust our word for it read Lifehacker’s (and Ed Bott’s) denunciation of it – it’s a bullshit tweak.
A clean Registry improves your system’s performance
On this one I’m not sure where I fall. I’ve always been a proponent of regularly cleaning out the registry. Lifehacker however quotes Ed Bott on the matter
I’d go a step further: Don’t run registry cleaner programs, period. I won’t go so far as to call them snake oil, but what possible performance benefits can you get from “cleaning up” unneeded registry entries and eliminating a few stray DLL files?
Process those idle tasks to clear memory
Okay this is a new one on me but given Lifehacker’s explanation it is easy to see the bullshit meter climbing to high. In fact if I read it and the provided Microsoft explanation implementing this tweak could actually cause you more grief than any help it is suppose to provide.
Optimize your RAM memory
Yet another silly ass tweak that is nothing more than snake oil meant to con you out of your money for products that will only end up slowing you down instead. This is because all they do is force Windows to write out running program’s memory to the pagefile. This only causes you to get a faster RAM for slower hard drive access. Lifehacker quotes Mark Russinovich on the matter
At best, RAM optimizers have no effect, and at worst, they seriously degrade performance.
Disable System Restore
Sorry but this is one of the worst tweak ever offered up since the option first became available. Besides the fact that System Restore (also known as ShadowCopy in newer versions of Windows) only kicks in during the install of applications or updates disabling this is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. My ass has been saved on more than one occasion because of System Restore and anyone who disables it will end up kicking themselves in the ass at some point.
There are a couple more myths, including the nonsense about disabling services but I’ll let you head over to Lifehacker to give them a read as their points are better than what I could only add to.
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