[Computers] Windows Vista

[Acco]

Author: Strelok
Original Thread: Windows Vista

Windows Vista

Windows Vista.

The monster operating system with insane stability and performance issues and apparently has horrible driver support and hogs your memory.
Well, maybe if you make it out like that.

Vista is a performance hog:

Many users with inadequate amount of RAM (I.E: under 1GB) and similarly slow Hard Drives which usually include a low spindle speed of 5400RPM and perhaps throw in a weak CPU to boot, combined with 2 or more resident anti-virus scanners, some extra un-needed bloat trial applications, which effectively will slow down the reading and writing speed of the HDD, take up the precious CPU calculation time and use even more RAM than Vista itself will, and then expect to game like that!




As you see above, Windows Vista spoon feeds information to you about your hardware and how to diagnose and keep your system oiled and greased.
Letting Vista checking your Experience Index rating by clicking the blue link will give you information on critical components about your computer.
Your score is based on the lowest sub-score, which is most likely the most potential bottleneck of your system, allowing you to properly examine your hardware in comprehensible format

As you can see, the section:

Windows Update
Security Center
Performance

Gives you a full link to performance enhancing tools (Disk Defragmenter and Disk Cleanup), gives you detailed information on your systems Security, and allowing you to understand the importance of keeping Windows up to date.
With these tools you keep your system "oiled and greased" and consistently stable and fast. There is no excuse.

Vista with the appropriate optimization and hardware will be much better at multi-tasking of any tasks such as: Gaming, web browsing, encoding, compression, watching movies, listening to music, than Windows XP, in this instance Windows XP would slow down a lot more from it's original speed.
Thanks is due to Vista's improved Input/Output system which handles requests from the HDD in a much more effective way. Combined with improved disk caching(Prefetch) and the implementation of RAM caching (Superfetch) along with the ability to use "ReadyBoost" on any USB flash drive. And a opinion born of my own thought that I believe the ACPI system may be much better than Windows XP for minimum IRQ sharing and resource hogs.

Caching, of course, will lessen the time it takes for the hard drive to access files, improving application load up times and general HDD speed.


Improving Hard Drive Disk[HDD] performance:



Defragmentation: Windows Vista includes a defragmenter which is a stripped down version of Diskeeper and is fine for the average user in most cases. To open it, click on the Start button of Vista, where at the bottom you see "Start Search", replace that text with Defrag and press enter.
It will come up with a found search, launch the Windows Defragmenter and the rest should be obvious from here.

Some great third-party defragmentation applications are:

PerfectDisk: http://www.raxco.com/#
Diskeeper: http://www.diskeeper.com/
O&O Defrag: http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/

Enable Write Caching and Advanced Write Caching:

To do this click the start button, in the right click "Run..", type this exactly without the quotes: "devmgmt.msc"
A window on the very right of the image shown above will come up.
Expand the Disk Drives section, and then double-click your Hard Drive device.
A window like like the section beside Device Manager in the picture will come up, make sure to go to the Policies tab.
Make sure: Optimize for performance, Enable write caching on the disk, and Enable advanced performance all have a checkmark inside the boxes.

NTFS Registry Tweaks:

Click the start button, in the right click "Run.." type this exactly without quotes: "regedit.msc"
A window will come up, in the left you should see something like:



Navigate through the left like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/FileSystem/

In the right pane, you should many DWORD values and a String value.
Click the mouse in a blank space on the right, and on your keyboard, hold the Ctrl key while pressing +, which should fix the columns to be easily readible.

Double-click on NTFSDisableLastAccessUpdate - this value should be set to 1 by default, which is optimal. The NTFS File System creates timestamps of previously done tasks, which is unneeded. If this is set to 0 on your system set it to 1.

Double-click on NtfsDisable8Dot3NameCreation - this value is set by 0 by default, setting it to 1 is optimal. 8dot3namecreation is a feature that I am blurry about for support of 16-bit applications, however most of them should still work but if you have problems set it back to 0 and reboot.

Search Indexer:

The HDD performance impact of Windows Vista's Search Indexer should be minimal, provided Service Pack 1 and Windows Search 4.0 are installed. Unlike Windows XP users shouldn't notice much of a performance difference when enabling / disabling this option. What Search Indexer does is speed up searching of files by "indexing" the files, which means it should consume your hard drive performance, however it is vastly improved over Windows XP.
However it would be smart to fine-tune what the indexer indexes.

*Disabling Indexing Completely: If you are like me and want maximum performance even if it is not noticeable, here is how to disable the Search Indexer completely:



To start off, click the start button, and in the right click "Computer".
You should see a list of disk, floppy, and hard drives that you may have connected. Right-click on one of your hard drives, in the context menu that appears click "Properties".
Stay in the general tab, and the bottom you should see: "Index this drive for faster searching", uncheck it, and click APPLY. A window will come up and it will process all the files on the hard drive, shortly after you should see a warning pop-up, click "Ignore All" as some files Windows will not let you make changes to. That is perfectly normal. Do this will all hard drives / partitions you have.

There is one more step to take.



To finish off, click the start button, and in the right click "Run..".
In the blank space type exactly without quotes: "services.msc"
A window will pop up like the one on the left in the image shown above.
Scroll down to the service: Windows Search. Double-click it.
Like in the image in the center on Startup Type: set it to Disabled.
Then click Stop. Click Apply, wait for it to process, and then click Okay.
(It would be optimal to reboot to fully process changes)

*Customizing Index:

To reduce performance impact slightly, and/or add misc. locations to index, it is very simple.

Click the Start button, at the right you should see a link to Control Panel, click it.
When the Control Panel is opened, look for "Indexing Options" and double-click it.
You should see many locations, to change this, click on one of them and then click Modify.
You should see a window pop up and navigate through your hard drive/partitions and uncheck locations that you find that you don't want, and check ones that you DO want. (The only real indexed location that I personally would even need is Start Menu and then add C:\Users\%Username%\Downloads\) Click Apply to process.


Features:

As you can see the Windows Vista Control Panel has many tools



Such as:

Backup & Recovery
Administrative Tools
Programs and Features
Windows Update
User Accounts
Welcome Center
Sound
Power Options

etc. To customize many aspects of Windows Vista, detail of each individual option is covered in Koroush Ghazi from TweakGuides TGTC(TweakGuides Tweaking Companion)... and Vista Annoyances Resolved Article:

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html
http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

Windows Vista also has Windows Media Center integrated, along with Windows Media Player 11, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Defender, Windows Sidebar, the list goes on. Most of these a standard Windows XP Home Edition install won't have by default. Vista is not a RAM hog, and is not a space hog. It has many applications integrated and the Superfetch RAM caching does not even take up that much RAM to begin with. A lot of extra features, and Windows Vista for most enthusiasts is generally more responsive than Windows XP

Windows Aero

You need a graphics card that can handle 3d acceleration power need for Aero.
You need your graphics cards drivers installed
You need any Windows Vista OS other than the Basic edition.

To access the Windows Vista Aero features, right-click on the Desktop, in the context-menu that appears, click Personalize.
At the top click Windows Color and Appearance
If Aero is not enabled then you will see the "classic menu" (if so: under color scheme select Windows Aero and click Apply)
You can customize the colour settings for Aero by yourself or select a scheme already available to you.











Windows Sidebar

The Sidebar is a neat tool that is highly customizable with user-addons easy to download. What most people seem to not realize is that you can detach Gadgets from the sidebar onto the desktop, and then right click on the sidebar on the DESKTOP [not system tray] and in the context-menu that appears, click close Sidebar. Then you can move the gadgets around as you please.

To get downloadable gadgets, right-click on the Sidebar icon in your system tray, in the context-menu that appears click "Add Gadgets". A page will load in your default browser, search for a desired type of gadget, and when you find it there should be an "Install" button, save as or open with, it does not matter, it will install into the OS regardless.




Games Explorer

One of my personal favourite features. The Vista Games Explorer will contain shortcuts of Games that you install that allow themselves to be displayed in there (a game inside the Games Explorer is usually a sign of a game that has good support for Vista, well, not always). Games Explorer will display Minimal and Recommended ratings to run the game, and other information like the Genre, Developer, etc, but it depends on the game.

Not all games will be added to this, you can add it yourself with VGE Editor: http://ryzza007.googlepages.com/vgee
Box art can be found on google to add. Here's a screenshot of my customized GE (There's no information displayed because I just like the box art!)



Windows Explorer

As shown in the first image, Windows Explorer is found as in XP and Vista by clicking the Start button, then by clicking the All Programs, and navigating to Accessories and in that section launch Windows Explorer. Launching the Explorer shortcut will give you a navigation tab at the left for easy viewing through folders, and is easier and neater than Windows XP.



I personally remove my User folder from the Start Menu, as I have Explorer in my quick launch, which opens in my
"Username/Download" folder, and at the top my User folder is available in the left, quick to access.

Windows Media Center

Originally you could only get Windows Media Center in a special edition released for Windows XP. Now it is included in all versions of Windows Vista. Obviously Media Center has improvements over it's predecessor. For me it is easy to setup and for other users setting up their TV Tuner has been a better experience. It also provides display optimization tips for your specific category of tv/monitor - not sure about that being in Windows XP.

The obvious basics for Windows Media Center is with using a TV Tuner card with a Media Guide you can watch TV - and even better pause/stop/forward/rewind depending on what resources are available for you to do that. Playing movies and music is available to you in a much more organized fashion than Windows Media Player 11. To boot, navigate to: Tasks/Settings/TV/Configure your TV or Monitor - to start optimizing your display's settings.




Windows Movie Maker

I believe Windows Movie Maker is in every version of Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows Vista has a GUI change over the version provided in Windows XP, extra transition / video effects, and faster and more compression options over it's predecessor. It's mostly by a matter of minutes the time it takes less than Windows XP to save a video.




Windows Photo Gallery
There is actually not much to say about this and not much customization or anything needed. I just love the way it display's photo's.



WinKey + Tab
By holding the "WinKey" the key on your keydboard that looks like the Windows XP logo, and then holding tab will bring an advanced alt-tab menu, and holding the keys further will scroll through your Windows that will go faster after a few seconds. Just holding the Winkey will pause the menu, and tapping it again will switch to the next process.



Security:

User Account Control: For this feature people forget to read: A program needs YOUR permission to continue.
UAC prompts are nowhere near bad after SP1 and usually come up only when you run an application as Administrator. That's the point, restricting the application and restricting you to a certain extent protects YOU from potential malicious applications.
Most people go ahead and disable UAC completely, however, I recommend using a fantastic program named Tweak-UAC. Tweak-UAC gives an option to set it to Quiet mode, which as I said, removes all the prompts, however you will still need to run some applications as Administrator. You remove the prompts, but you are still not 100% administrator. Link: http://www.tweak-uac.com/home/



Windows Defender: while I still recommend using 3rd-party applications in conjunction with UAC and Windows Defender, there are still definition updates regularly provided, and as such you should not disable this application. To access this click the start menu button, click All Programs, and right there click Windows Defender.

Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection:
This feature was implemented in the release of SP1, however it is still disabled by default. To enable it is simple. Click on the Start button and click on "Run.." located at the right. Type exactly without quotes: "regedit". Navigate through the left pane like this:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\kernel\
In the right you "should" see a DWORD value named "DisableExceptionChainValidation" if it is not there, it is simple to create it yourself.
Right-click on the blank space in the right, a context-menu should come up, navigate to New > and select DWORD (32 bit) Value. Name it exactly without quotes: "DisableExceptionChainValidation" and after then double-click on it and set the value to 0. Hexidemical or Demical should not matter.
This is known to cause problems more specifically like Cygwin, Skype, and Armadillo products with these feature enabled. However the particular application Skype works absolutely fine for me.

Data Execution Prevention
To simplify things, I feel a quote from Wiki is appropriate:

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature included in modern Microsoft Windows operating systems that is intended to prevent an application or service from executing code from a non-executable memory region. This helps prevent certain exploits that store code via a buffer overflow, for example. DEP runs in two modes: hardware-enforced DEP for CPUs that can mark memory pages as nonexecutable, and software-enforced DEP with a limited prevention for CPUs that do not have hardware support. Software-enforced DEP does not protect from execution of code in data pages, but instead from another type of attack (SEH overwrite).

My CPU actually has No-Execute Protection but I personally disable it to maximize performance. To change the way DEP behaves is simple.
Click the Start button, then click "Control Panel" located at the right. Once opened double-click "System". In the left click "Advanced System Settings"
A window will pop-up and should bring you to the Advanced tab by default, under the section of Advanced, and under the section of Performance, click Settings. Then click the Data Execution Prevention tab. "Turn on for essential Windows programs and essential services only" should be the default and optimal balance between performance & stability / security. However if you want maximum security, consider checking: "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except for those I select". If you are having a particular application, add it to the list of exceptions.



Summary

Windows Vista is overall a great operating system, and is better when following advice from Koroush Ghazi, creator of www.tweakguides.com, I personally recommend his TGTC and Game Guides as I classify them as "responsible tweaking". Providing unbiased information and generally helping system stability instead of the opposite.

Windows Vista runs great without a single crash/glitch or hitch, and is running perfect for everyday usage without any compatibility problems whatsoever.
This "article" will be updated a bit more in the future as there many things I haven't discussed about, especially in the Security and Feature sections.
I hope I have given at least one person a reason to upgrade to Windows Vista.
Cheers.