Taking Advantage - Windows performance tips

Don Bradbury looks at some Windows settings which offer large operational speed enhancements for the PC user

While most computer users know there are certain things they should attend to in order to keep their computer running well, there are some settings on the machine that are rarely touched by the average punter. Yet, potentially, some of these offer the biggest gains. We'll look at one or two of these in a minute. But first, the basics.

What's running?

Few things bog down a computer's speed, especially an underpowered one, than to have dozens of unwanted applets or processes running by default at startup. Loading them thrashes the disk drive and hence delays the start of the next disk read; they hog the computer's memory and hence put more reliance on the Windows Page File; in short, they can slow down proceedings so much that you may wish you'd stayed with the old computer (and it's OS) that you ditched last week.

There are lots of software goodies out there, even freebies, that let you list these running programs, but in Vista, for example, you can summon Defender's Software Explorer to the screen and see what's running on the PC, letting you either disable or remove any you don't need, assuming you're sure of their purpose. If you don't, look them up in your search engine before disabling them.

Maintaining the hard drive

Periodically defragmenting your disk drive is a good thing to do, perhaps every month or two, depending on the amount of use the disk gets. This puts back into contiguous segments of the drive all the file parts that have become scattered around the disk over the intervening period through constant usage and file expansion, which makes disk reads slower than they need be.

Looking after the Operating System

Cleaning up the Windows' Registry with a reliable optimisation program is also a speed-up procedure you should not ignore. Our relatively new Vista PC showed over 700 'errors' in the Registry when we first ran our recommended Glary Utilities freebie system optimiser on it. None of these were serious errors; they were typically pointers to missing files or empty folders, so they could be safely deleted, thus speeding up the Registry read and hence the overall boot process.

Now we come to some of the more major speed improvements you can make.

Using Hibernate

Speaking of the boot process, each new version of Windows seems to take an eternity to boot the computer compared with the last OS you ran, other things being equal (which they never are, if only because of the increasing tendency to bring bloat software). We needn't go into the other reasons for extended boot times here, but in fact there's little need for a full boot as a regular routine. Hibernation can be very much faster, and it can get you into productive mode in a fraction of the time you'd be used to if you routinely shut down the computer each time you switch off.

To illustrate, we carried out some timings to quantify the difference. Not that there's anything specific in these timings; they just apply to one particular machine we tried, but we believe they typify the sort of variability you might expect to see. We were using Vista Home Premium, not heavily used, on a modestly powerful laptop for these tests.

It will be immediately apparent that there are appreciable gains to be had by using hibernation instead of full shutdown, particularly by way of your startup times. Hibernation holds your current system and applications in memory in a file on your main drive, using no power at all to maintain it there until you need to boot the computer again, so it's quickly reinstated when you switch on.

The downside of hibernation is that it doesn't clear out any accumulation of redundant code from memory that's left behind when applications are closed, so it's advisable to fully reboot every so often, again depending on the amount of daily use the computer gets. In the meantime, save yourself lots of time by hibernating the system. Holding open apps in memory enables rapid startups to a fully working state.

Speeding up your disks

Certain common processes have associated settings within the OS that shout 'hurray' when the PC user finally gets around to discovering and using them. One aspect of this we investigated recently was the sundry settings available in Windows for enhancing disk drive performance. Here, while testing an external 500GB drive that was equipped with both Firewire and USB 2.0 interfaces, we first ran a full backup of our test computer using Acronis TrueImage v11, with Device Manager at its default setting for drive policies, 'Optimize for Quick Removal', when using our generally preferred Firewire connection. (The graphic below shows our preferred settings).

We then repeated the procedure with all three performance enhancement settings switched on, as shown. Impressed - and we have to admit somewhat surprised - with the huge improvement, we then switched off, in turn, 'Enable Advanced Performance', and then 'Enable Write Caching on the Disk' each time repeating the backup runs. The table below reveals that, in this process at least, there were enormous gains to be had by enabling the disk performance settings.

Of these, the option permitting write caching on the disk appeared to bring the big gain. The relative speed of drive backup was nearly three and a half times that we saw with Device Manager's default setting. The bottom setting of the three, 'Enable Advanced Performance' offered no improvements in this particular application.

Using USB 2.0 (the results for which we've put in brackets), while there was some measurable effect, it was nowhere near as great as with Firewire in this particular application (data backup). In a different application the story could have been significantly different. We showed this in our review of the Buffalo DriveStation Combo TurboUSB 500GB where file transfer speeds were 35% faster after making the USB2.0 speed-up settings in Device Manager, so you can't beat testing it yourself in these circumstances. Device Manager doesn't offer all of the performance enhancing options for USB that it does if you connect via Firewire or ATA. You just have the 'Optimize for quick removal' and the 'Optimize for performance' options.

But the moral to this story is, first, ensure a continuity of power supply - and the only way to do that, realistically, is to interpose an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) in the power circuit - and then remember to engage those performance enhancing settings in Windows' Device Manager in the disk drive Policies section.

We would not suggest that such large increases in performance would be seen in every type of disk activity you could think of, but our tests show the potential, and we reproduce them here to illustrate that point. It's up to us, as end users, to engage the enhancements before starting work with a new drive, whether internal or external, after noting the caveats that Device Manager shows in it's Policies dialogue.

You may consider the risk is minimal; after all, you'll certainly set the performance enhancements for your main drive, UPS in the circuit or not, so you may consider it worth the risk for external drives, though we'd recommend taking regular backups of important work files just to be sure. Corruption of the open files is likely to follow if the power fails while they are being processed and you don't have the 'quick removal' option selected.

In conclusion

There are sundry ways to make appreciable operational speed gains with the modern PC. Don't necessarily believe all you read in terms of system optimising software, but certain aspects of system setup can be crucial to making the most of your hardware. Investigate a little, and be vigilant in taking regular backups of your data; you can't attend to that task too often.

Don Bradbury