MZ Vista Force (Tweaking Guide)

it's a personal choise about AV. i do install it on every other computer, though.

i had tune-up and it messed up some computers. and you have to pay for it except for the illegal version, which has spyware in it (yep.. grr had to find that out the hard way ).

i just think if you have ccleaner, tuneup doesn't matter much.

disk defragmenters, i know them. occasionally i use defraggler to only defragment huge-fragmented files. but i do have ssd's everyhwere so i don't care about them really

 

Tweaking is nice, depending on what you tweak. Im my case i just disable whatever im not using (about 20 services) and have about 5 startup programs.

I believe UAC is crap IMO, in my case i just prefer a router with a firewall, antivirus with a software firewall so even if something tries to connect to the internet (rogue apps) you get a message if you want to allow it or not and 1-2 on demand spyware/malware scanners. Having UAC on just gives me a headache since every 30~secs i have to press allow for something.

As for people saying tweaking doesnt work, of course it does, if you actually know what to tweak, i managed to squeeze a few fps in games and about +300 3d mark (06) points just by tweaking services and Vista appearance (no im not using the classic theme). Not to mention Vista boots at 700mb ram usage instead of 1gb+ now.

So, repeating myself. Tweaking works, if you know how to tweak and dont just go around switching off whatever people tell you too, these programs are not made for a "tick everything" usage and sadly a lot of people dont know what they are doing or what do disable and at the end what they manage to do is cripple their system and then blame the software, which is not the case.

 

yeah, and you're much better than microsoft in knowing how the os works. espencially with your statement about UAC, you've proven this </sarmasm>

tweaking does mostly placebo effects, and is very counterproductive. this got even proven and stated by microsoft. most tweaks will, in long term, make the performance of your os worse. disabling services doesn't make it faster per se, f.e.

but you're so cool to know better than them. so all is fine.

but you should learn how uac works, and ACCEPT THAT IT DOESN'T POP UP EVERY 30 SEC. except you have some funky spyware trying to install itself, that is..

 

Maybe the way you use your pc it doesnt, for me it does and it annoys me, instead of insulting people you might wanna accept the fact that because you like a feature not everyone should like it. Since they change the way UAC works in Win7 to have a 3rd option (to basically inform you when important things are happening) id imagine more people had the same issue with me.

And let me give you a small example about tweaking. Why have a fax/printer/Aero services running when you never use any of them ? And as i said, yes it will in games at least. Doubt you will see the difference while running applications etc, but in games you do see a difference by tweaking.

 

I personally disabled UAC.
UAC does not slowdown the system but I don't like the nagging message.
I know is slightly dangerous to have UAC turned off. Yet, I don't care(LOL sounds cool).

Agreed with davepermen that tweaking on vista is useless.
It actually shutdown many of your services and programs as told before and make your computer to run faster. Sometime, I can't feel it is faster though. I do agree some services and start-up is not needed. However, turning off such intense of programs and services recklessly may lead to system malfunction or unstable sometime.
For instance,
LoLing .exe services is turned off from start-up.
You installed a software which need LoLing .exe to run smoothly or work.
After all, you end up need to enable the service or can't opent the software you installed.
Moreover, sometime it may cause system to clash. THIS IS SO COOL!

 

aero is faster than not having aero enabled and fixes a lot of tearing-redraw issues of good old xp days.
fax/printer. well, the moment you may use one it's more hassle than worth. and it does NOT TAKE YOU AWAY ANY PERFORMANCE OR RAM OR WHAT EVER to have it enabled. it starts up and directly goes into idle, releasing all ram to pagefile. but it will be there the moment you need it (which may just as well be the moment you create a pdf, f.e.).

and tell me, why does uac pop up for you all day long? except while tweaking the hell out of your system.

i do insult people that think they know better but should finally open their eyes that THEY DON'T. i know tons of people hazzling with their systems to make them better, while having no clue that they don't. you sound like one of them by every of your statement. espencially your uac statements. which show that you have no clue about it, and exagerate big time. like most users. and THAT is why microsoft had to change it for win7. because users are whinyboys.

 

Are you talking about me?? or the?

 

the coolmine one.

 

If you handle your os correctly, and your apps, you should not have much "nagging" messages, at all.

 

Sigh...

UAC pops, i hate things that pop on the screen, we didnt have UAC on XP and we were all fine, if you need a "babysitter" to prevent "things" of getting installed on your pc then you should keep it, or you might as well learn how to take better care of your system and learn how to avoid rogue apps since lets face it they dont grow in trees they come from somewhere.

Never had issues with viruses/malware/spyware the X years ive been using Windows products and same goes with Vista without UAC.

Another thing, idle process dont use resources ? Of course they do, but only a small amount, my question is, why let them use that small amount if you never use them ? Tweaking is not meant for people that just use their pcs to talk in IM's and run their job programs (photoshop for eg) all day. As i said before, by tweaking you will see the difference in games mostly and not on applications, so if you dont game you simple wont notice the difference.

As for aero, i dont like aero, i dont like themes, i dont like the style, hence i choose to disable it. Printer, fax ? Its so hard to go to services and just enable the service WHEN you need to actually use it once a year right ? I mean it takes a whole 10 seconds to do it and doesnt even needs a restart to work...

 

and about the printers and faxes service. darksilver showed it with the funny **.exe that got disabled. but disabling fax and printers can make random apps fail. i think snagit is one of those (but vista has snipper so it's unneeded). quite some graphic apps have issues if they can't use a printer, etc.

the problems happen sparely, and you can't often realize that it's your tweaked service that's the problem. and then, you cry "uhh crap vista" instead of "uh crap me, i've messed my system up".. seen it often enough.

 

I would like to learn how but I has no time currently.
Maybe when I have my holiday then I may learn it from you XD!

 

Hahaha! Actually, this is what I want to tell but I afraid of my poor English(broken) can't make it.
Anyway, some people often do not realize the tweak they made are actually killing themselves.
~NO OFFENSE~

 

Its not like i use dos I mean im using windows as well and never had issues due to disabled services or my tweaks and my system is heavily tweaked at the moment. Tweaking in not meant for everyone, simple

 

yep, we where all fine.. except all the nimda affected ones and tons others. except all the ones where a simple bluescreen rendered the os useless, a hawok app killed some system files, etc.
there is a reason for UAC. it's the you don't have to care reason, the os knows better than you reason. and it's a TRUE reason.

nice for you. i never had a car crash. i dont need a savetybelt. same stupid thought.

you wont notice a difference as it is not even in the promille region. ()

is it so hard to leave it on and never care? that way all works out of the box and never gets in your way. the 10 seconds you have to do the "oh, crap, i can't print, wait, i have to enable the service" makes you look like a fool, and is more time than you ever gain when you run vista 24/7 for 1000 years. and this is a low estimate, i'd bet it's when you run it for 100000 years.

services that are idling don't cost anything. except at boot up a tiny bit. you can read about this in the win7 blog.

 

Insulting me wont really help first of all. Did i call you a moron or anything else ? :/

Im not going to even bother with this anymore since it seems you cant really understand a few things.

Because you like something it doesnt mean everyone has to like it, you like UAC i dont, you like Aero theme, i dont, you hate tweaking and find that it doesnt have any effect, i disagree and my 3d mark and games performance show otherwise instead of just plain words. Because you fail to accept that and you need to insult people to actually make them "see your way" id imagine you quite immature and honestly im not really in a mood to try to explain people how some things work.

If you want 10 safety belts for your car i dont really care, just dont tell off other people that only want one (UAC, AV, anti spyware/adaware/malware programs). If you never seen the benefits of tweaking it means you dont game and if you dont game then you shouldnt even respond to what im saying since i said tweaking mostly benefits gamers and not casual people.

Again we are not talking only about services here, we are talking about services, themes, things you are already running (windows defender ?) etc.

From what i can see you are user with currently a router (since most people have) UAC on, an antivirus, windows firewall and windows defender running (at least) i rest my case here.

 

i do game. i do system admin, etc. i know that tweaking doesn't help. i've done enough of it over the years. i grew older, i've learned how an os works. and i learned where i may not be as klever as the ones that implemented something.

you're not yet at that step.

i have a router, i have uac. and windows firewall. those are like seatbelts, airbags, and driving at a save distance to the one in front of you.

you didn't call me moron, no. sorry for that.

 

btw, for having the aero features (faster drawing of windows, no tearings and "white zones" anymore, preview windows, smooth animations and such) but not aero, there are a lot of nice themes around in the web. vistaglazzer can patch your system to allow foreign themes. i personally like aero, but use one with a smaller taskbar.

 

Of course having two antiviruses instead of one if better. But how many people actually use two of them ? Not many, thats because after some point extra security is not that needed. Same goes with the seat belts example. Only one. Why run windows defender for eg (which takes a nice amount of resources if im not mistaken, 40-60 i think) if you already have two programs that do its job ? Why run UAC if you already have a hardware and a software firewall that will warn you if anything suspicious is going up (not to mention a AV capable of detecting those category of apps).

For me all this is an over kill, hence why i choose to disable them, of course if you let everything enable it will make your system more secure, but it comes down to user preference.

This system is mostly tweaked for gaming, so anything else that doesnt have to do with gaming or affect my gaming performance has to go.

And lets not forgot, tweaking isnt a permanent thing, if you want something you already disabled your 10 secs away from enabling it.

ps: for the aero post above which i missed
For some odd reason i dont like themes, ive been trying out themes since windows 98 ? But for some reason i always "get tired" and switch back to the default one. Same was Aero for me, its nice to see but after a while i just dont see a use for it. Ive got half of the windows animations disabled as well so i dont really see the smoothness of them since they dont exist As for faster drawing windows etc never seen any difference but thats probably due to system specs ?

 

no, two SAME savetythings don't help. but UAC is NOT an antivirus, nor a firewall, nor anything an antivirus or firewall can give you.

 

just re-enable your printers, and realize that it does NOT affect your gaming performance at all. i bet your score will still be 13132, even while that score doesn't mean anything (and any gamer knows that ).

why don't you just play games instead of hazzle with the system? those tweaks don't give you enough boost to warant the work invested in it. but they do harm the stability of your system, they may reduce performance over time, and thus tweaking doesn't really help.

i know right now you only care about gaming. but you'll get older and then get bored at how you put stones in your own way all the time. useless stones.

 

I just noticed that your user-avatar shows that you won't listen anyways

 

Yea takes a lot of proof for someone to convince me (bit too much actually)

But yea, printer service for eg probably takes less than a mb of memory (a few kb probably), but its still something i dont use. And at the end of the day going down from 1gb + ram usage when Vista boots down to 700mb is a "decent" difference.

My system was 12.6k when i received it so a 500 point boost from only tweaking is quite nice too, although it does translate to like 1-3 fps in games. Tweaking is something i like to be honest thats why i do it.

Also about the reduce performance, im not so sure about that since benchmark programs like Futuremark actually performs better than other M17 (same specs of course) and thats about multitasking performance, calcs etc and not only based on games (3d mark). So even on that area it seems that "healthy" tweaking actually works pretty good.

I spent a lot of time tweaking my systems, ive probably tweaked all windows i had so far and there are a lot of options that can actually decrease your performance, a nice example is superfetch and readyboost which most guides say you should disable them to release some extra ram etc, but they actually decrease your system performance if you do.

But after trying a lof of tweaks at some point you will have 50 (?) of them left that actually increase your system performance, so at the end you get a nice boost all around. And as i said, i can prove that by benchmarking, im not just saying that.

 

but none of those benchmarks f.e. show boot time, or driver loadup time for games, etc etc. none of them prove that the system overall is faster. only in some usecases of the system.

and still, no, 200-300mb ram usage is not a decent difference. at least not in a 4gb world. it's 5% difference, which means, it's not much at all.

one thing that happens is f.e. if you disable all the fancy networking services, then the ordinary networking gets slower and slower. that doesn't show up in any benchmark but may change gaming behaviour.

and 1-3fps more is not much as well. we're talking about 2% increase in a normal game (60fps), 1% in a game with 100fps. no, sir, that's only measurable, definitely not feelable.

and still, your printer service will not eat more than some kb, that is some percent of a percent of a percent of a quarter of what you have in your system. and it will not take away ANY fps from your games. it's premature optimisation, which is considered evil (google it up). and it's in your case the least of all evil: it's a placebo.

that nice boost you talk about took you tons of time to invest in tweaking and gave you only 1-3%? that's reason enough for me to continue supporing the statement: tweaking doesn't help you at all.

that's like tweaking with your favourite shop to get 1$ less to pay on your new laptop. yes, it's one $, no, it's not much

 

Yea but dont forget that all of this comes without actually trading any stability from your system etc.

So basically at the end of the day you get 1-5% extra performance by getting rid of the things you dont use.

Networking for eg, why keep IPv6 services ? Or (not in my case) any network services if you are not on a network. Or the wireless service on a desktop pc with no wireless card and so on.

From my point of view its like taking the trash out Getting rid of the things you dont use. Tweaking is not sacrificing everything or system stability for better performance. Windows ships with 100 different things so that it appeals to "everyone" out there. No one actually uses all 100 things, so why keep them all ?

Any free performance boost is welcomed, even if thats 1%

Worst case scenario, if you tweak something and you see something is not like it should be, you are 10 secs away from "fixing it".

 

the trick is those services to trash-out themselfes.

it's not a free performance boost if you tweak for days and days and benchmark and validate stability over months to be sure that you have not lost any other quality.

thats NOT FREE PERFORMANCE.

if you tweak something and it's not like it should be, that can happen to only show up months later, and then bite you in the ***.

those services are idling till there happens to be a signal from the os showing there is a need. like the wlan one. it does't do anything except for the moment the os reports "hey, i've got new, hw, it's a WIRELESS CARD". and then the service says "oh cool, lets see if it finds some wlan for me". the rest of the time it's just waiting for that message, not doing anything. and waiting does NOT eat resources. learn programming and os development to understand that this is true.

 

How can you free up 300mb+ of idling services ? Means something is not idling that much.

Not to mention internet/cpu/hdd spikes when that something decides to do something ? Windows defender updating for eg ?

And of course services that open a port (a stealth one) that can be exploited.

 

that ram may not be in actual use, so it may be paged off to your disk, virtual memory FTW

yep, i get terrible spikes like.. uhm, never? services don't open stealth ports that can be exploited. if they would, windows would still be in it's xp days.

 

135, 139, 445

As for the ram ive been using Samurize to track pc stats for about 2+ years now. So its easy to see the difference on ram, cpu and hdd spikes when changing something

 

samurize, yeah.. shows the same as taskmanager. your virtual used ram. doesn't mean much if you have a page file, though.

and those ports are not open for everyone. normally only for the internal network, and are some of the most save ones existing. that's what your routers firewall is for, not? or the windows firewall, for that matter

that's the different security levels i've talked about. uac is about never messing with your system files, not even accidentally, not even a faulty app, not even a virus.

the firewall is about chosing what can come in and from where.

 

btw, a simple rule about ram: if you don't have your ram used, it's wasted ram => lost ram => bad.

that's what superfetch is for, but as well the services. they let that stuff stay in ram that may be quickly needed (and only that). if you even need that ram, they get paged out to disk till they get used.

so in the end, even while you now have 5% more "free ram", it would get free anyways the moment you need it. and else it would be filled with something potentially useful (not for you maybe, but that doesn't matter).

 

If the firewalls could stop people from exploiting...

Im just trying to point out that sometimes by disabling some services and closing down those ports is actually better for security.

Samurize can track page file as well btw Well it can track pretty much everything if you set it

But again, i do agree on some extend about tweaking. Tweaking blindly is bad, since if you ever get a problem you wont know if its a problem of the OS, the softwares or something you tweaked.

But for people that actually know what they are doing and know how to troubleshoot its godly

Its not only about ram though, its cpu,hdd activity etc. Im a bit paranoid on those things, if i see the hdd light blink i want to see what is witting/reading. And by disabling 10% (lol) of the OS i can say that it feels much better for me

Its been years i had a problem due to the tweaks though, the ONLY problem i had since Vista was with superfetch and readyboost (since i like to check everything by myself) which crippled the system and boot times when disabled. Other than that, i had no issues whats so ever.

 

samurize just use the windows interfaces, and they may not report the truth to it. samurize isn't any better than opening the taskmanager. it doesn't explain what the memory management does and why. it just reports some numbers you interpret blindly.

and no, closing down those ports is not better for security. it just reduces your os usability: you can't use shared files anymore (and believe me, the day you love and embrace local networking will come.. ).

it never has those ports capable of opening them to the public anyways, except if you have explicit port forwarding in your router. and on every new network, the os actually asks if it's a public network AND CLOSES ALL DOWN IF YOU SAY YES IT IS.

so the os does the right thing, all the time. and btw, closing those ports can be done without any service tweaking or anything. it's actually the DEFAULT setting in your network properties.

so all in all, all your work is still mostly useless, about paranoia (and thats from ME, who talks that everyone should leave UAC on!! ) and haven't given you any real gain.

 

Again with the useless

Benchmarks increase, means for that particular job the computer does a better job, considering there are X benchmarks products out there im pretty much confident i can out perform most if not all the laptops with the same specs (not overclocked or anything else ofc) At least thats the fact with the current benchmarks i already run.

So an increase is an increase, even a small one its still a gain and as i already said, i had no issues for a "while" now. Cant call that useless or pointless

As for file sharing, thats what i said earlier, if you dont use it you dont need it Also, even if you choose to turn the feature off, do a netstat -a and you will notice the port is still open.

ps: Yes samurize isnt better than taskmanager but taskmanager doesnt sit on my desktop all the time

 

they increase in percents. which is useless. you placeboize yourself that you believe that it's a real gain. it isn't. it's no gain. 1-2fps don't matter at all. never did. not even 10 years ago where systems where much slower.

if fps are a problem in a game, changing some gpu settings or the screen res helps much more than 1-2 fps and thus make a gameplaychanging difference.

as for file sharing: it's NOT ON BY DEFAULT. till the moment a network is detected AND YOU GET ASKED IF IT'S A PRIVATE OR PUBLIC ONE. if you don't use it, it's NOT THERE. and it's not attack vector, then, eighter. not that it ever is in a router-environment. it technically just can't be. no way.

 

Every company uses routers, and hardware firewall which cost a lot of money and people still manage to exploit some security bugs, dont relay that much on them. As i said above, even if you choose to turn file sharing off the port is still open, netstat -a to see what i mean.

As for benchmarks its not only fps wise, many benchmarks benchmark the time your cpu takes to do X calcs, open X files and so on, less cpu spikes = better benchmarks. And you do see an increase in those, since thats how i test my system to see if they perform better, i run a ****load of benchmarks

 

Just by the way - what does a synthetic benchmark tell you about real life performance? Not a lot - it tells you how it does task A, not how it does tasks A and B.

Maybe you can cripple an OS down to its basics so it runs faster - but I actually believe this exists already - its called safe mode...

 

Yea i do agree on that but the only thing we have to compare systems is synthetic benchmarks at the moment sadly. So the only options i have is them and my ability to see if the system actually feels slower or not

 

And I think this feeling is the problem - human perception is - sadly - in objective terms absolute junk.

So Vista is a touch slower at bootup - we say its a lot slower than XP - as a result we will no longer notice, or pay that much attention if programmes suddenly launch much quicker in Vista.

In fact, if I gave you two computers - same specs - and tell you one is some quadcore CPU; OS on a 10.000rpm drive or even a SSD etc. ans say the other is some slow Pentium Dual core, slow drive etc.
You will claim the "faster" machine is slow and the "weak" machine is fast.

 

Im pretty confident i could tell the difference between an ssd and a 7200rpm one

But yea, since we cant relay on the human factor that much, thats why companies made these synthetic benchmarks, might not be the most reliable way but at least it gives you a general idea about your system and a "score" so you can compare your computer with other people.

I cant really say "its synthetic so ignore the score", im working with what i have and since the most reliable way to compare computers at the moment is by comparing these scores thats what i do

 

If you read my above post again - 2 identical machines, I'd just tell you one is a SSD or so and the other a slow HDD.

I'm not saying there isn't a difference - from looking at spec there must be - but its your perception.

You are right though that synthetic benchmarks are the only objective comparison.

 

WoW!
Both of you're really something.
I just slept for a few hours and the topic became 10 pages long.
So, who got the BEST solution here on UAC?

 

IMO, UAC is down to user preference. If you know what its job is then you should know if you need it or not So, no "best solution" here

 

But how many people know what it really does?

 

You dont really know "exactly" what it does

Just the basic guidelines which take about 1 min of searching google to find.

I dont want to paste posts about UAC since this topic will go from the tweaking discussion to a UAC since most comments are not possitive

 

I wonder if we arrived at a point where we apply the "tweaks" of a Ford Model T to a Maybach.

One is simple - we understand it, and we can improve it by change little things.
The other is complicated - and if we change one thing we don't know how others are affected - unless we do a course and learn how everything works.

I think he same happened wit our OS - Vista is to complex to interlinked to really tweak it - unless you programmed it.

 

Yea but you can always make little changes that wont really affect the rest of the parts that much, even if you dont fully understand the rest of them.

Although everything has its procs and its concs. Some people say (taking the car example) if you want to tweak something on your car use whatever the manufacture is "allowing" you to you, for eg, max of 18rims instead of 22+

But as always they are people that enjoy tweaking their cars their own ways even if thats not the way the manufacture will allow it

Key phrase on this topic is "user preference".

 

I suppose.

There is one "Tweak" no-one argues about - in most cases:
Disabling bloatware that comes with your software - I mean things like java update sheduler - some disagree - Quicktime (which is just troublesome...needed it for my Oxford Dictionary...somehing chaged that and it doens't work any more...) or Adobe Quickstart - such things can be disabled safely.

 

Yea i hate the fact that almost every program nowadays comes with 1-2 services. Not to mention the programs that try to install toolbars or install 3rd party software without telling you anything about them (bonjour anyone ?).

 

Yes, I know those...

Why on Earth do I want an Adobe file watcher? I organize my files in the good old Windows Explorer.

Or my BlackBerry Synch Software that comes with Roxio - its great for synchronizing Media and reencoding it to phone needs - tried a TED talk on my BlackBerry after I dowloaded it - didn't work - reencoded it and it worked - by the way, before anyone asks, TED talks are a creative commons license.

But this Roxio software adds some Peer to peer service? Now why on Earth do I want that? All I want to do is be able to synchronize problematic files with my phone.

...I suppose the list ist endless... - I wonder, are programmers paid to put in toolbars? Like the Yahoo toolbar in CCleaner... (which I never installed - what for?!!!!!???)