So, one of the most asked questions I hear is: How do I speed up Windows 7?
Most guides will tell you to turn off all the aero features and use no background wallpaper. That’s not useful, that’s more like a trade-off, because who wouldn’t want a nice desktop? And AeroSnap is really useful! I agree that you can get some more performance by doing this, but it’s not worth it. If you think you don’t need a “fancy” desktop, then feel free to do it anyway:
1. Hit Start
2. Enter “SystemPropertiesPerformance” into the search field, hit enter
3. Select “Adjust for best Performance” or at least uncheck the first two entries
How would *you* speed up Windows 7 then?
First, let’s think about it .. what is really consuming a lot of CPU and memory? Right! All the services that are running in the background all the time.
Turn of services and boost your Windows 7 gaming performance!
To turn off all those unnecessary services we use a tool called “GameBooster”, it’s obviously only one of the ways to do it, but it’s a lot faster than doing it manually. You can temporarily stop all services (that are not required) while you play. Best of all, you can even edit the services list with just a couple clicks and add more services to get even more performance.
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Boost Windows 7 Gaming Performance with GameBooster
To add any other services, click on “Options”-”Edit Service List”. Now, simply add any services using this format: RemoteRegistry=1
What other services should I add to this list?
Computer Browser (Browser=1)
Protected Storage (ProtectedStorage=1)
Remote Registry (RemoteRegistry=1)
Secondary Logon (seclogon=1)
Security Center (wscsvc=1)
Themes (Themes=1)
Windows Errors Reporting Service (WerSvc=1)
Windows Media Center Service Launcher (ehstart=1)
Windows Search (WSearch=1) Windows Time (W32Time=1)
Speed Up Windows 7 Using ReadyBoost (Big Plus for Low-Ram / Low-End systems)
Ok, now all unnecessary services are stopped. What would be the next logical step? When AMD and Microsoft were not able to increase the CPU power significantly any more, they simply added more CPU’s, that’s why we have dual and quad-core CPU’s nowadays. So, what you can do is to get more RAM. However, we don’t want to buy anything new, because we’re on a low budget. Although, I am sure that you own an USB-stick , right?
Since Windows Vista there is a little feature, that most people do NOT use effectively. To be honest with you, I haven’t used it myself and I might run into errors while I try to show it to you. The feature is called ReadyBoost and can give you up to 6% more performance. This depends on the amount of RAM you have. Low-End system with less RAM will see a great performance increase and many applications will load faster. Since Windows 7 there is no longer a memory limit of 4GB and you can use several devices for ReadyBoost.
1. Plugin your USB-stick
2. Move all your files on that stick into a folder on your hard drive to make room – it’s just a test!
3. Start the Explorer (Windows + E), do a right-click on your drive and select “properties”.
4. Open the tab “ReadyBoost” and pick “Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost”. Click on Apply.
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ReadyBoost - increase your performance by 4-6%
Ok, so we added a ReadyBoost device. Let’s see what it looks like:
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ReadyBoost Cache (898MB)
On the drive you can find a cache file now that should be pretty big. I still had some other files on the stick, because this is my MP3-player.
5. Repeat the steps 1-4 for all other devices (unlimited)
Check if ReadyBoost is working
What’s next? Right, did it really improve my performance or is a USB-stick (not even USB2.0) insufficient? First of all, I did a check to see if the ReadyBoost drive is working.
1. Goto “Start” – Enter “Performance” into the search field
2. Click on “Performance Monitor”
3. Add “ReadyBoost Cache”
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Add "ReadyBoost Cache"
I started the game “Command&Conquer Red Alert 3″. I thought if my drive is working, I should be able to see something now – and I was right:
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ReadyBoost Cache Graph
According to Tom Archer, your card is supposed to have the following requirements:
2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes
Tom also put together a great list that will answer any question you might have about ReadyBoost, for example:
Q: Aren’t Hard Disks faster than flash? My HDD has 80MB/sec throughput?
A: Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.
Make sure to visit Tom’s Blog if you want to know anything about ReadyBoost.
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx (http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx)
Speed test your SD Card, CF Card, Flash Drive, HDD
Next, I downloaded a tool called “Crystal Disk Mark”, which is pretty cool to speed test your sd cards, flash drives and any other disk. In the meantime, I added my USB2.0 Card Reader, one 2GB CF Card and one 2GB SD Card (lucky me), because I was pretty sure that my MP3-Player wouldn’t perform very well.
Download Crystal Disk Mark http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html (http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html)
Unfortunately, the results were very close to the requirements, but still below:
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Benchmark of my 2GB CF Card
Next, I tested my SD Card. I supposed it would be a lot slower – how wrong I was!
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Benchmark of my 2GB SD Card
Last but not least, I tested my 1TB HDD to compare the three drives:
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Benchmark of my 1TB HDD (Seagate 31000)
Conclusion? The SD card is performing really well and is my best choice for a ReadyBoost drive. Considering that I only have 2GB of RAM (dual channel), I think that this can increase my browsing speed. I usually have a lot of open tabs in firefox and as you might know firefox is eating a lot of resources, therefore I’m pretty happy about this setup now.
Can ReadyBoost really help me to boost my performance?
Is the performance boost notable? Well, it might be a bit early to comment on that, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is a good choice for low-end systems and systems with less RAM. On systems with more RAM than 1GB it will be only notable if you run some resource-hungry programs or programs that run a lot of small, random I/Os.