Extreme Tips: Optimization Derby

By: Andy Walker of the tv show Call for Help
What maintenance tweaks are the most effective?

There are a few things you can do to tweak your system performance, but not all of them are as productive as you'd think. We took a few systems and did some of the typical optimizations to them to see if there was any increase in system performance when we ran a standard benchmarking program, Futuremark's PCMark 05.

Each system started in a lived-in condition, after months of typical usage. We benchmarked them first in that "lived-in" state, then again after each optimization.

Removing unnecessary start-up tasks

When you start up your computer, a bunch of programs start up at that time, and run in the background of your system. If you're not using those programs regularly, you should either uninstall them. Also, if application run "pre-launch" programs so that they launch more quickly when you need them, disabling those pre-launch programs will speed you up too, if you don't use them regularly.

To see a list of what programs are running on your computer, go to the start menu, select RUN, and type in "msconfig". Choose the startup tab to see the full list of tasks, with checkboxes in front;to turn off a startup process, uncheck the box.

You can check what processes do by going to www.processlibrary.com -- there's a list of a number of system processes, and you can find out which ones are essential and which ones can safely be turned off.

Norton WinDoctor

Part of the Norton Utilities suite, WinDoctor cleans up your Windows installation, getting rid of items that point to invalid locations, removing invalid ActiveX controls, and other things that can impact your system's reliability. But does it actually give you a performance increase?

Well, no. On all of the machines we tested it on, the difference in performance was always within the range of statistical error, which means that for all intents and purposes, there was no real performance increase. But cleanup is always good.

Defragmenting

Fragmentation can be a serious problem on machines that are already slow... performance can suffer if the hard drive has to piece everything back together from tiny pieces scattered throughout the hard drive. How much of a difference does it make, though?

With lightly defragmented drives, not a whole lot. If your system is really fragmented, though, it always helps to get everything together every so often. With our benchmark, we saw very little change after defragging the drives on our newer systems...a small enough change that it could well be statistical error. On the other hand, after a thorough defragmentation, our Windows 98 system booted up in half the time it previously took.

Norton Speed Disk

Norton's Speed Disk not only defragments your drive, it puts all of your regularly-used files into the same place at one end of the disk, so that the hard drive's head doesn't have to move around quite so much.

Again, for most machines it's better in theory than in practice. System performance was minimally impacted by re-ordering the files so that the most frequently accessed were in optimal locations on the hard drive.

Regseeker registry cleaner

This one was a free registry cleaner, and we wanted to see if it would find some stuff that was plugging up the works. After running the cleaner, of course, we re-benched the system.

Well, no surprise here: No real performance gain. The system registry will be a bit cleaner, but don't expect your system's performance to be any less sluggish.

Adding memory to the system

If your system is really sluggish, there's a possibility that you just don't have enough system memory to go around. If your system already has one gigabyte of RAM inside, there'll be no huge performance gain adding much more, unless you're using applications like PhotoShop that use huge amounts of memory. If you're running with 256 or 512 megs, you might want to bump it up to a gigabyte if your system will handle it.

We took a system that had 256 megs of RAM in it, and gradually increased the RAM until we got to a gigabyte, and we noticed a small performance increase each time. Beyond that, performance increase tends to be quite minimal, though we actually noticed a slight performance increase on a system that already had one gigabyte when we added another 512 megs to it.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Many of the usual suspects when it comes to Windows optimization won't make a huge difference on your system if your system is relatively new, unless it's so screwed up that anything will be an improvement. The two that you should consider first, though: removing programs you don't use, even if it's just from your startup files; and, adding more memory to your system, especially if you don't have much memory in your system.