Top tips for speeding up Vista
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Microsoft on
Running Vista? Planning to roll out Vista? Here are the top tips from this year’s TechEd IT Pro on improving performance.
Install SP1. If you can’t install SP1 it means you have one of 13 or so drivers that are so badly written that it’s not worth doing anything else to the system until you get rid of them. Of course Microsoft doesn’t want to come out and point the finger at companies like Dell or NVIDIA, so you’re going to have to figure out which drivers to try updating or replacing, or you could try installing from a Vista image that includes SP1 which works on some systems that can’t handle the update.
Give it a couple of days. Whether you’re installing Vista or SP1, the system has to watch what applications you like to load to make SuperFetch work properly – this arranges files and pre-loads them to make application and file loading seem faster. Vista isn’t born psychic; like a fake medium it has to gather clues before it can impress you with its prescience. Also, leave the machine on overnight to let the search indexer wade through your email and hard drive. Indexing backs off when you’re busy so it won’t slow things down, but you won’t get the instant access to your information that makes for the biggest productivity improvement in Vista until the index is done.
Plug in a ReadyBoost stick. Flash is getting cheap enough that a 4GB or 8GB USB stick or SD card won’t break the bank and it speeds Vista up as well as saving battery on a notebooks (flash is faster than hard disk for virtual memory and uses less power). And SP1 fixes what was more a matter of trust than a bug; when your PC comes out of hibernation SP1 now assumes that if your ReadyBoost stick is there it’s the same one you had in before and uses it straight away, rather than throwing away all the information on it and then putting it all back, just when your PC is busy un-hibernating and you’re busy waiting impatiently. If you don’t use ReadyBoost, HIBERFIL.SYS is arranged more logically so it’s faster to read back into memory anyway.
Check your drivers, BIOS and apps. In lab conditions, boot and un-hibernate times for SP1 have gone from 30 seconds to 17 seconds; anything longer than that and you’re waiting for something other than the OS.
Check for managed code apps. Managed code has a lot of advantages, and managed code apps that are coded correctly will notice shutdown events and shut down like any other program. Only it turns out that about 90% of all the managed code apps Microsoft looked at weren’t coded correctly and didn’t shut down. SP1 addresses this, but if it’s a line of business app you should get the code fixed as well.
Install Windows Server 2008. Copying files on your Vista machine will feel much faster in SP1 because the copy is now cached: instead of writing the file straight to disk, Vista tucks it into memory and tells you it’s done, then sneaks it onto the hard drive in the background. The overall copy takes about as long, but you don’t notice it as much and the estimate of how long it will take is much more accurate. But if you’re copying files over the network, the way to get the 30-40x improvement that both Microsoft and independent experts like Mark Minasi have measured (that’s not 30-40% better, that’s 30-40 times better) is to have SMB 2 at both ends. SMB 1 goes back decades and isn’t suited to fast networks and big files because it requests and copies just 60K of the file before going back and asking for more, clogging up your network, tying up your server and trashing your patience. Plus Vista RTM had four 8MB buffers for those 60K requests, so the disk had to seek 8MB every time it got another 60K, making for a longer write time (and I’d expect, a lot of fragmentation for the automatic disk defrag to sort out). SP1 has eight 32K buffers instead, so it can deal with the 60K chunks much more efficiently. Any flavour of Vista talking to another Vista box or a Windows Server 2008 box uses SMB 2 instead, which uses 64K I/Os, asks for everything at once and generally behaves like a grown-up file transfer protocol.
Don’t run the photo screensaver. This has been rewritten in SP1 not to steal all the memory on your system, so waking your machine up no longer requires a context switch to get your applications back into memory, but a blank screen uses less power anyway.
Update – or avoid – the CPU Meter in the Sidebar. This little tool for measuring performance was, well, introducing performance issues (and the way the Sidebar clock managed the CPU was eating battery). There’s a new version but there are also much more powerful alternatives. Even in SP1 I personally find the Sidebar (or something in it) often takes up to 50% of my CPU. Usually I just turn it off, but the next time it happens I’ll run Microsoft’s Windows Performance Toolkit instead. This is PerfMon on steroids, tracing down into individual DLLs and services (if you install the DEBUG symbols from the application vendor; Microsoft makes these freely available for its own apps). Don’t run it for too long; in three minutes Xperf creates a 100MB log file. XperfView lets you overlay graphs, hide the irrelevant apps and threads and manipulate the data to see what’s at fault, whether it’s an app, a driver, group policy being applied or even faulty hardware. Use the Xbootmgr tool to measure shutdown and startup issues. Get the tools from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx and get tips on using them from the program manager Richard Russell at http://blogs.msdn.com/pigscanfly/.
Call Microsoft. You get free support questions on Vista from PSS until March 18 2009, so the sooner you install Vista, the more problems you can get fixed without paying for help.
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