This is even more important if a Windows operating system has been installed on the Solid State Drive. (It is basically the same deal for Linux users who should think about moving all write intensive tasks to other drives)

Three different types of tweaks can be applied. Tweaks that are applied directly to the hardware device in Windows, tweaks to the Windows operating system and tweaks to applications.

Hardware Tweaks:

• PIO Mode

Make sure the SSD is not running in PIO mode. To verify that go into the Device Manager, open IDE ATA / ATAPI controllers and double-click all Primary and Secondary IDE Channels.

Verify that there are no signs of PIO Mode under the Current Transfer Mode entry in Advanced Settings. It should list Ultra DMA Mode 5 there.

• Enable Write Caching

Click on Disk Drives in the Device Manager and locate the Solid State Drive. Double-click it and open the Policies tab on top.

Select Optimize for performance and enable “Enable write caching on the disk”. There is no need for the quick removal option as the SSD will never be removed from the computer (like any other hard drive).

Windows Tweaks:

• Moving the Pagefile

Moving the pagefile to another hard drive has a positive effect on the performance of SSD drives.

Go back to System Properties. Click on the Advanced Tabm there on Settings under the Performance entry. Again on Advanced in the new window and finally on the Change button under the Virtual Memory entry.

The Virtual Memory window opens and it will display all drive partitions on top and the size of their paging files. Select the Solid State Drive and check the “No Paging File” entry. Click the Set button to set the new preferences.

Now select another hard drive and assign the pagefile to this drive.

• Move the temp files

The Advanced tab under System Properties has a button entitled Environment Variables. Click it and locate the temp and tmp variables for the user and the system. Change the path to another hard drive if they are located on the Solid State Drive.

• Disable the Indexing Service on the drive

Right-click on the drive letter of the SSD and select Properties from the menu. Locate the Allow Indexing Service to index the disk for fast file searching line and make sure it is disabled.

Application Tweaks:

Most application tweaks center around the idea of moving temporary files to another hard drive. Take the cache of web browsers or temp files during video production for example. Moving them to another hard drive will have an impact on the system’s performance.

Do you know of additional tweaks that might improve system performance of SSD drives?

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That is where Turbo Service Manager (via Download Squad) comes into play. The software program feels like a portable advanced version of services.msc. Like its official counterpart Turbo Service Manager displays all Windows services in its main window. The name, description, state and startup type are listed plus the dependencies which is the first major difference to the Microsoft tool.

Dependencies are other services that either depend on the selected service or services that are required to run before the selected service can be started. Father and child processes so to speak. It is possible to sort all services by every listed parameter.

Working with Turbo Services Manager is easier because it provides keyboard shortcuts for most possible actions. It is possible to start, stop, resume, uninstall and pause services with keyboard shortcuts. The same is true for changing the startup type of a service. One interesting feature is the option to select multiple services at once and apply an action to all of them at once. Something that is not possible when working with services.msc.

Turbo Service Manager can select all services that depend on or are required for the selected service to run. More interesting than that option is the ability to save and load a Windows services configuration. Test Load displays the changes that would have been made to the services configuration if the configuration would have been loaded.

TSM is a small portable application that runs fine on 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista

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The decision was made to search for the setting that would make desktop icons transparent in Windows. It was there, somewhere that was sure but it is sometimes hard to remember if the setting was a standard Windows feature or available through so called Windows tweaking tools.

The option to make desktop icons transparent is a Windows feature which means that every user can set it in his version of Windows without having to install third party software.

It can be found in Control Panel > System. A click on the Advanced tab and Performance loads the menu where the parameter can be changed. The Visual Effects menu contains the entry Use Drop Shadows For Icon Labels On The Desktop. Activating that option will make desktop icons transparent.

This setting reset the theme of the computer which can be easily fixed in the Display Properties.

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It’s fairly interesting that some of the tweaks that do not work have made it into tweaking applications and that new Windows tweaker sometimes contain these as well. Not working means that they either have no positive effect on the system or are even hurting performance or the system in general.

The following list contains 5 Windows tweaks that are fairly popular on the Internet but are proven to have no positive effect on the computer.

• 1. Deleting the contents of the Prefetch Folder: – Deleting the contents of the Windows prefetch folder will actually degrade system performance during startup of the applications that are listed in the folder. The folder contains a maximum of 128 pf files that Windows uses to quickly look up load information for the corresponding file. The folder gets cleaned automatically once the 128 file limit is reached.
• 2. Unload DLLs: – AlwaysUnloadDLL is a Registry setting in Windows that is very popular in tweaking utilities. Enabling this setting supposedly frees up system memory. The key has in reality no effect on Windows NT systems and was only used in pre-NT systems.
• 3. Enabling Superfetcher in Windows XP: Superfetcher is a feature of Windows Vista that is not existing in Windows XP.
• 4. Disabling System Restore: – Creating a System Restore Point is a quick process that normally only lasts a few seconds while the monitoring of the system causes no apparent performance loss. The only reason to disable System Restore would be lack of hard disk space.
• 5. Disabling QoS will free up the 20% bandwidth: – I’m seeing this tip all over the Internet. “Networking Quality of Service (QoS) refers to a variety of techniques that prioritize one type of traffic or program that operates across a network connection instead of relying only on “best effort” connectivity.” The computer is using 100% of the bandwidth but 20% can be reserved by programs when sending data. In reality disabling QoS has normally no effect on the bandwidth of the computer.

Want to share tips and tricks that you encountered that do not work ? Go ahead !

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