How do you tweak your Win7?

I recently installed safari, and they give an option in the installer not to install all that "updater" software crap. Can't comment on other apple software.

I've also had bad experience with google update software.

 

Oh I see, noelia gets a free pass when posting a STUPID suggestion without any sort of explanation. And dave gets called out for pointing out how ridiculous the suggestion was in the first place.

I get it now. Clearly you think it is a matter of "personal choice" and everyone should be free to suggest whatever they want to "improve" the performance of someone else's machine without so much as a single word about when and how such an "improvement" might affect a user. OK, I have one: reboot your machine and go into safe mode with only a command prompt. Type format c:, then locate a windows 3.1 disk. Install said OS. You will be amazed at how fast it boots up and how fast programs load. It is a miracle. Never mind the pesky issues with not being able to run modern day software. By the "personal choice" doctrine, I don't need to make any mention of that, do I?

Well that's fine, according to you everyone should just continue to post these alleged tweaks. But guess what... dave, myself and others will continue to point out the fallacies of these posts, whether you think it is a matter or "personal choice" or not.

Gary

 

Can we just agree to disagree?

 

Nope.

It's like the Yankee v Red Sox.

 

Well, I'm a service tweaker..

I don't use search and thus there is no reason for it to heat up my harddrive.
I have a machine that is not on a network, disabling services decreased boot time (vista).

That being said, Win7 seems to be much better at not running services that are not needed. If you look at the configuration in Vista vs. 7 this is clear.

You guys must really be annoyed by BlackViper :-D

The only tweaks I've done so far in 7, is to disable auto update, and most other automatic things.

Remove search.
Remove games.
Classic view of control panel.
Disable autoplay.
Destroy Adobe reader.
Install Foxit reader

 

no. as most tweaks get applied due to false knowledge, and false thinking of what one gains. thus spreading them without explanation hurts. as that way they pop up in google searches, people do apply them, and it spreads further, hurting more and more.

there are tons of tweaks that show up from time to time which are known to be nothing but fake, and still spread like hot waffles around the web.

you should take really care what knowledge you spread on the web, if you don't want to take part of making everyone stupid.

 

Blackviper advocates the same things we advocate. Fully understand the changes you are making to your computer. Make backups before you start changing system critical services.

I applaud him for all the testing and research he did into his articles before posting his tweaks.

Sadly, he's in the minority.

 

indeed. i'd love to see people explaining more 'why they do something'. and if they tested, if that 'why' got actually reached by the changes.

 

Can I get an "amen", brothers and sisters? Blackviper's site is the epitome of
what tweak sites and applications OUGHT to be. Very detailed, very transparent, very rational.

Gary

 

Well that's good to hear. I just got the impression you thought there was no reason ever, to change settings from the "out of box" experience.

Some of your statements just come off a little... harsh. Perhaps you're getting a little frustrated repeating yourselves

Anyway, I believe there is a long standing tradition to screw up your system as much as possible trying to fix it (for no reason). Let's hope the subsequent unravelling of the messy system, is a path to enlightenment

 

yup, it's hard to repeat the same over and over again. that fear enough lets me never be a teacher

I love your statement about tradition. yeah, might be. if a pc works, something's wrong we have certain need to be able to bash on it

 

You guys do know that those "tweaks" n0elia listed (disable search, uac, etc) are all on viper's site (except the media center removal).

 

and who cares? it's bad habit to post something without a why, or how it helped, or what ever to it.

i wouldn't just post "buy an ssd". i would post "buy an ssd, it really enhanced the speed and snappiness of all my systems, worth the money", or something.

 

It's nice to explain why, but it's the responsibility of the user to actually do some research and find some information. Who in their sane mind would do something they read on the Internet without looking it up first?

 

everyone. including you.

it's the responsibility of anyone stating something in public to make sure it should be stated in a form that will not lead to wrong uses, wrong understandings, etc.

 

Until people can speak using only their minds , there will always be wrong understandings (language barriers, people think differently, etc).

Also, people do actually look up information before they apply their tweaks, so you are wrong in saying "everyone".

 

always consider worst cases. people WILL use it without looking up. people DON'T read OPs, people don't click on links. they don't read articles.

a quick summary right at the tweak, that has the highest chance of getting read.

i don't want to by the reason why people apply wrong tweaks resulting in worse system experiences. that's why i always try to put short, but detailed context around it. anything else is just sloppy and non-responsible. something we try to to fight in here.

 

Not sure if that was to me.. and my rather old comment in this thread about symbolic links, but if so.. Symbolic links have only existed in Vista and 7 thus-far, and obviously only in NTFS.

 

i might have mixed them with hard links, is there a difference?

but they're at least nothing new to win7 afaik.

edit: and yes, it was to you


edit2: just read up on it. yeah, they're different. but there was something like symbolic links in winxp: you could create stuff in the network share (similar place where f.e. sharepoint puts it's groups in), and those links could go anywhere. you could copy them out and use them where you wanted.

they behaved in the os like symbolic links. but they're not a low level feature (they're a folder with a link in it, re-interpreted as a "folder mapping".

 

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that! They're such a simple, yet extremely powerful tool. I always wondered why it took MS so long to implement them.

 

i could get far enough with hard links and those pseudo-symbolic links i described. but they're nice to have, yes.

they're cool for the random stupid fix. other than that, i'm happy to not have need for them very often.

 

Harsh? Maybe, but ONLY toward idiots who do nothing but "parrot" the latest tweak that the sister of their second cousin's great uncle overheard someone suggest in an elevator. Or suggest without telling anyone about the potential downside if they apply it. Or those who suggest that a tweak that might be fine for a narrowly targeted audience is the greatest thing since sliced bread and EVERYONE should be using it. If that's harsh, then yep... guilty as charged.

As for the path of enlightenment, I think it is better found through the sharing of INFORMATION and FACTS, not in cleaning up messes.

Gary

 

And what ELSE is there... INFORMATION about why they work, what the side effects might be... etc. None of which were relayed here or even linked to.

Tweak suggestions without accompanying information are abhorent just like tweak apps that don't document WHAT they do.

Gary

 

Threads like these crack me up.

People are going to disable stuff like UAC and search indexer cause for some people, it provides them no benefit. Oh well.

 

question is. do they really know? have they really tried? has turning off the search indexer helped them in any form? performance f.e.
did turning off UAC really had no bad consequences. would they notice it, if? i bet not. they would just blame microsoft that they somehow messed up their system, not understanding it could have been that modification.

what was it again? Inductive reasoning? not really, but strange reasoning at least. a lot of people do the "i changed it, it has not negatively affected my experience right now, so it can not do any harm during the years i use the os" reasoning. which is wrong when ever one turns off a security feature. just because i don't lock my door anymore doesn't mean i get robbed the same day. but i increase the chance for it.

 

Well yes, people are sheep most of the time Tweaks are useless if you're not even informed about the actual changes(note I didn't even say "gain" or "loss") that said tweak will bring. I think changing stuff in an OS is a bit less obvious than say leaving your door unlocked or something of the like lol

Btw Dave, your door analogy was quite brilliant; it does technically provide a minimal sense of speed increase(you don't need to unlock it before entering and "waste" 30s of your life), but at the same time it leaves an open flaw to the whole security structure of the house. To me, even if tweaks 'might' increase speed, sometimes the tradeoffs aren't worth it. I recall the only tweak I did with Vista was disabling that thing where Vista always checked for a second monitor at startup because I knew I'd never use one and I read that it did nothing else but then.

Nowadays the only "tweak" I do to Windows 7 is to make the windows not group together on the taskbar

 

door lock and uac are similar in that case, yes. a slight gain when you would have to click one time more, but everyone can get into your system and mess with it.

i prefer another one, about doctors being able to open your body without your permission, but the door one works well

 

I just don't like UAC's nags. I know what I'm doing (most of the time) and I don't want my computer to question me.

My Win 7 x64 installation eats 1.6GB of RAM right after booting. Is there any way I can cut that down to less than 1.5GB? I have 4GB of RAM total. Indexing and UAC are already off.

 

he questions you when you're about to hurt him irreparably. you would ask "are you sane??!" when somebody would put a knife into your body to "fix something" in there, too.

to fix your memory problem, turn uac and indexing back on...

 

You shouldn't be getting that many UAC prompts anyways(at least not enough so that it'd be considered "harassing" the end user). UAC should at most be appearing when you do some form of cleaning or during software/driver installations. If it appears in a significant manner(as in a lot) other than those 2 scenarios then you're doing something weird or shady with your computer

 

Why is that a problem? You paid for 4GB, why not let the system use it? Unless your experiencing slow downs, why worry about it?

If you really want to reduce it, find what's hogging the memory (task manager, resource monitor).

 

Tweaking breaks stuff, upgrade the hardware and keep the system tidy and you will not go far wrong.

 

afaik vista and win7 will pre cache your most commonly used applications in memory for faster start up. so it could be that. but w7 will dump that cache when it needs the extra memory so it should be no problem with regards to performance.
alternatively, the programs you installed may have installed additional processes like updates and system tray icons and quickstart facilities to name a few. this could a little bit of bloat but should be no problem for a modern cpu and 4gig of ram.
you could disable them using msconfig if you want to.