Essentially it does what you could do manually, it finds the services and apps running that you don’t really need, and switches them all off with the push of a button. It switched off Launchy for me, the Aero theme for Vista, which apparently eats away at the CPU, some tablet services I didn’t even know I had running, etc., so it does quite a good job.

I actually didn’t notice a huge increase in performance, but the difference is there. I tested on GTA 4 which runs away on my system, but not very well. On minimum spec I can play pretty well, with only a few effects added. In very intense areas I noticed some performace issues were less prominent, like less lag and jittery camera, so it definitely did help. The best thing about this app is that it is so easy to use, no need to go through 20 services and shut them down, but even better, they can be restarted with the same one click action. This is also great for trips to prolong battery life!

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Cnet used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark to test browser performance of the browsers. There are other factors that have an impact on JavaScript performance like the processing power of the computer system.

The results were that the latest Firefox 3.1 beta with the new JavaScript engine TraceMonkey was the fastest with a score of 2,257, followed by Chrome with 2,904, Firefox 3 beta 1 without TraceMonkey with 4,233, Safari 3.1.2 with 6,351 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 at the end with a score of 9,025.

Cnet failed to test any version of Opera and should probably have tested the latest nightly test of Safari instead. Here are the results that a Windows XP service pack 3 with a Intel 8400 Wolfdale processor and 4 Gigabytes of computer memory.

• Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 without TraceMonkey- 1800
• Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 with Tracemonkey 1817
• Firefox 3.03 – 2139
• Opera 9.6 – 2736

It’s a bit surprising that Firefox without TraceMonkey was faster than Firefox with it enabled. It could be due to the fact that the portable version of Firefox has been used to run the tests. But the interesting question is, how does your browser compare? You need to run at least two browsers to be able to tell how it compares to the other browser.

Keep in mind that JavaScript performance is not everything and that page loading time is dependent on additional factors.

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After checking out all the online tech websites I followed all the tweaking tips such as disabling background services, turning of animations and visual effects, using the Vista Power Saver application and various ‘speed-up-windows’ programs.

Since then I have reinstalled a couple of times and discovered that all these tips are essentially useless on a decent, fairly new computer.

I could notice no performance improvement at all with all visual themes enabled then with them disabled and I got near identical battery life with aero on as I did off. I’m going to call this as complete bollocks:

>

This tiny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features. Running in task bar with private workset of 5.5M and 0% CPU it will do all work for you, by enabling and disabling customizable features when power source changed or battery power fall under certain percent.

All you need is the advanced Vista Power Options and you can save a lot more battery power. As far as disabling background services go I will simply echo Ed Bott’s advice:

That is breathtakingly bad advice. It is as if the automotive columnist in your local newspaper told you to open the hood of your car and start disconnecting wires and hoses one at a time to see which ones made your car run faster or quieter or smoother. It might be hours or days or even weeks before you run a program that requires the service you disabled, at which point you might have no clue that the disabled service is the cause of the nonfunctional program.

Here’s the reality: On an otherwise healthy PC running Windows Vista, disabling most built-in Windows services is extremely unlikely to have any noticeable effect on memory usage, startup or shutdown time, or system performance. On the contrary, you are more likely to create problems by disabling services. Not to mention the amount of time you will surely waste and the productivity you will lose with all that starting and stopping and rebooting and web searching.

Any services which are causing significant slow downs on your computer are likely to originate from a third-party source such as Nero’s background indexing. Windows Defender may also cause some slowdown with it’s daily scan.

And lastly the system tweaks, many of these will make some small improvements, but they largely apply to specific actions and are not connected to overall performance itself.

What is your opinion on this? Am I wrong? Did these things make a difference to the performance of Vista on your computer?

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3D Mark06

3D Mark06 comes in a limited free version and $20 upgradable version. The program does a number of tests to your PC then brings up the results in your browser compared to other slower or faster systems.

Fraps

This tool will give you a quick indication of what your graphical frame rate is by sitting in the corner of the screen and providing automatic updates. Additionally it also does screenshots and screencasts via the shortcut key.

Sandra

This program provides complete system diagnosis and documentation. It’s completely free and provides a series of tools which will benchmark your PC, show hardware and software details and configuration and a whole number of other tests. This program will take a while when running tests but it provides the most comprehensive results of the three.

CPU-Z

This program runs off a USB drive and is designed for those who are interested in overclocking their systems. By running it you can get all the hardware details of the system, useful maybe for checking the specs of someone else’s computer or for making sure you buy the correct item to upgrade.

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While I did not conduct any tests I have the feeling that everything is running just a bit more fluent, a tad faster with less activity on my hard drives. I had a lot of hard drive activity for instance when Newsbin was loading the headers of a popular newsgroup which seemed to have been reduced quite a bit by the increase in RAM.

It should also have a impact on games for instance. I don’t play games at the moment except for CIV IV which is an excellent game but not a resource hungry one. It seems to run a bit faster but I could not see a big change here. It will become more obvious when I start playing games like Hellgate London for instance.

I’m running XP which does not need that much RAM. If I would be running Vista instead I would probably see a big increase in performance though. I sometimes have to work with large videos and a short test has shown that the video editing application uses the additional Gigabyte well.

So, yes it is faster. Yes it reduces load on the hard drives. Yes it is totally worth it. At least for me.

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So, open the Device Manger by either typing device in the search box of Windows Vista or typing devmgmt.msc from the command line. Go to the disk Drives tab and right-click the SATA drive and select Properties from the menu. Now select the Policies tab and check the box Enable Advanced Performance. You have to repeat the process if you have more than one SATA drive installed on your system

You have to perform almost the same steps to speed up usb drivers under Windows Vista. Open again the policies tab of the USB drive and select Optimize for Performance from the options there. This method has one little drawback, you need to Safely Remove the Hardware if you want to unplug the device from your system.

Both tips have been found at the How to Geek.

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This tips might also be useful to those users who use an old computer with Windows Vista. My Vista installation is using about 430 megabytes of Ram in default state with only one instance of Internet Explorer 7 running as well. The following paragraphs contain a list of changes that I made and their effect on the system.

• Disabling the Sidebar
• Changing the Design to Windows Classic
• Changing the Background image to one color
• Disabling the Windows Firewall and Bitdefender

Those changes alone dropped the ram usage by 60 megabytes to 370 with one Internet Explorer window open. There are many settings that can still be tweaked to gain even more performance, for instance removing unnecessary services and indexing. I will take a look at those in the coming days.

The question of course remains why you would like to change to Vista if you disable everything “new” that Vista offers. I personally think that it introduces lots of gimmicks that freeware on XP offered for years. And if it is security that you want you should take a look at Linux instead.

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Some of the features that I disabled yesterday are also mentioned in the pcstats.com beginners guide. I do not advice you to use each of the 99 tips, for example I would not recommend to overclock your pc. Categories worth taking a look at are “Windows XP Software and Registry Performance Tweaks” and “Improving Windows XP boot speed” which can have a great effect on overall speed of the system.

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