Speeding Up Windows Vista

Last week I promised to continue the Vista story, focusing on speed. I must admit the speed I have been able to squeeze out of the Lenovo X61 is very satisfying now, with a few exceptions. So let me try to describe the actions I applied (relevant to both hardware and software), step by step.

Software:

• As I pointed out in my first real rant on Vista, the first problem you face when buying a new computer nowadays is the enormous amount of bloatware that bogs down the system. So the first step is to clean up the system. Really the best way would be to perform a clean system install from original Microsoft media, without any demos / trials / other teasers eating your CPU, battery and RAM.
• The second step is to get rid of unnecessary native Vista services. There is a good guide at http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html. I cannot point to anything specific, as what you may or may not need depends on what you use the computer for.
• The third step is to watch CPU consumption when adding new applications or new devices. Example: I added a HSDPA PC-Card modem with a customized connection manager, supplied by the Plus GSM, a mobile network carrier in Poland. After installing the software I found the CPU stayed around 10-20% even when the system was completely idle. Tracing down the software stack I nailed a small application (IPlusChecker.EXE) responsible for this. And all it was intended to do was to fire the main connection manager once you pop in the PC Card modem. The IPlusChecker.EXE was polling the WMI subsystem (Windows Management Instrumentation), causing the drain of CPU resources. Removing it from the memory and from the autostart section gave back the lost CPU power, all I have to do instead now is to fire the connection manager manually when I insert the modem. Not a big deal - just a mouseclick away.

Hardware:

• Make sure you have enough RAM. Generally 1GB is not enough and 2GB is even more than enough (my system consumes around 1,2GB of RAM). But never ever try to run Vista on a 1GB machine unless you really want to suffer for all the evil in the World.
• Consider ReadyBoost. Very cryptic. The X61 comes with so called "Intel Turbo Memory" on board. However it sounds, the principle is not as complicated. Turbo Memeory is just a fast flash drive. ReadyBoost is a concept introduced in Vista to keep the memory swap file on such a drive. I am not sure how much it helps, generally people say it does not help that much, but well... I have this built-in, so why not use it? If there is no ReadyBoost device on the motherboard, you may experiment with USB flash drives, but do pick the fastest you can.
• And really, get yourself a HYBRID DRIVE.
  

Two weeks ago, when I wrote about the Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive I installed in my Vista machine, I was not aware this was a hybrid drive. OK, I knew the new Hitachi drive was 7200RPM, 33% faster that the previous 5400 RPM one. But it seems the NV (Non Volatile) cache being part of the drive is what gives the real boost. After the first system boot with the new drive on board, I traditionally went to the device manager to check the properties of the new drive. There I found the new NV Cache tab telling me the drive had 387MB of flash memory cache on board and the cache could be controlled by the group policy administrators. That means no simple on/off switch. Fire the GPEDIT.MSC instead. Windows Vista offers four group policy settings that are aimed at helping you to control the way that Windows uses hybrid hard drives. Each of these four settings can be found at Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System | Disk NV Cache. The description and the settings themselves are very cryptic and counterintuitive. Suffice to say you have to disable all of them to get maximum boost. Vista handles hybrid drives the smart way. Not just using the cache as a pass-through device, but locking in it certain elements of the file system that are very frequently used. As the cache has a near-zero access delay, this mechanism has the potential to speed the overall system operations a lot. And it does. The disk upgrade has been like adding a turbo mode to the system. And because the physical heads are moving less frequently, the overall power consumption is even lower, despite more processing overhead introduced by the encryption algorithms within the drive.

Having said that, I have to admit my Vista laptop is now noticeably faster than the older XP machine. I can only imagine how a fully SSD-based (Solid State Disk) system, like the latest Lenovo X300 would perform... Unfortunately we will have to wait until 2009 for SSD drives of 100GB capacity or more. And I will probably wait for encrypted ones...