Vista - Performance Tweaking Myths

I just read this article over on LifeHacker.com. It could be of some interest for you as well. Enjoy.

Mythbusting: Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths

My goodness.In XP I used to empty the prefetch file once a week,to get rid of "junk files".As for a Registry cleaner.I still use CrapCleaner,on both XP,and Vista,but avoid using the Registry option.

Good job the article does not advise against anti-virus products....then I would be really confused.

A nice read.

chkdsk (error checking) and defragmentation is all I do. I did setup the 12MB cache in the registry. The rest of the Vista options did not really load with my hardware specs being so high.

All I do is run a TuneUp once a week, which does a defrag, cleans up files that are no longer needed, and does a full system scan for viruses. I also uninstalled the features from Vista, that I don't need or wont use, including Windows Fax and Scan.

I know enough, where I can go in to the registry and delete orphaned entries without messing up my system.

A program that comes to mind, that can royally mess up the registry, is the registry cleaning tool in Fix-It Utilities. That thing can delete entries it should be deleting when run. I know, cause I tried Fix-It Utilities on XP a number of years ago, and it royally messed up a few things.

Disabling QoS to Free Up 20% of Bandwidth

This tip made the rounds with people believing that Microsoft always allocates 20% of your bandwidth for Windows Update. According to the instructions, you were supposed to disable QoS in order to free up bandwidth. Unfortunately this tip was not only wrong, but disabling QoS will cause problems with applications that rely on it, like some streaming media or VoIP applications.
Rather than taking my word for it, you can read the official Microsoft response: "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."


*** COMMENT REMOVED BY: Brink ****

Loving the avatar, ripbox :P

Hello Ripbox,

Please be sure that you read the entire tutorial before making a statement like that:

QoS Bandwidth Reserve Limit

However, I will update the tutorial to help clarify it even more.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention,
Shawn

A better compendium of myths:

XP Myths

Vista Requirements

Not a lot of myths for Vista, in fact none really mentioned - but the XP myths are still applicable to Vista for the most part, so....

Shawn is the Vista OS incarnate; you go Shawn!


Later Ted

yeah, most of this already makes sense to me, except i do disagree with a couple:

1: clearing the prefetch folder does shorten boot time (more specifically deleting the NTOSBOOT.......pf file does on my machine) but you end up with a longer logon time because your programs load at logon, not during boot. So it takes the same time, possibly longer.

2: I would have thought disabling pointless services when ur pc is limited to a small amount of ram would help your pc from paging more stuff everytime you run an app that needs a lot of memory.