Vista Tweakers Should Watch This First

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/cc952917.aspx

 

About an hour long...will be a long watch. Hopefully they keep it unbiased, seeing it is hosted by MS peeps.

 

summary in two sentences?

 

1) Disabling services for improved performance is a myth. Uneccessary as they do not consume significant resources when not being used, and to do so could actually hinder the dynamic optimization aspects of Vista.

2) It could take several days of use for Vista to optimize dynamic boot and application features. You need to wait several minutes between restarts for Vista to cache an optimized boot file.

3) Much more to learn in the video and gain a better understanding of how Vista works.

Sorry that was more than two sentences.

 

Yep, as those people who actually know something about how real operating systems work have known for a long time... Service tweaking is generally a waste of time. The only time when it is a good idea to disable a service is if it is a poorly written piece of software, that tends to crash or causes crashes, hogs resources, etc. Some OEMs, such as HP, are known for that kind of thing, but I digress...

Another good point, and one that many a hobby-tweakers would do well to take to heart.

Sounds like something worth investing the time for.

 

OMG, like WMP?

 

Hmmm..will have to check this out!

Thanks for the info & linky



Cin

 

Thanks for summaries, I was a little mad when MS demanded I install Silverlight to watch a dang video. Geez, do they have to have their own video program?

 

I think number one sums it up as well as people freaking out about how many processes are running. That is not a good way at all to judge system load.

 

Perhaps not, but when the majority of them are "SVCHOST" it is a pretty good indication of the design.

 

WMP is not a service...

 

What kind of an "indication" does that give you, pray tell? Inquiring minds want to know...

 

I'm wondering that as well. Since Windows loads various .dll files into groups, and spawns the necessary svchost services to load them (and thus keep Windows from crashing if an unrelated dll failed and all were loaded in one srvchost process), why is there a problem with multiple svchost processes running?

 

Been using pc's since apple II myself - PC XT - etc. Been on XP for the past many years and just got my new notebook with Vista 64.

All I can say is Vista boots in 36 seconds to the desktop (after I repaired the damage from tweaking I read about around here), Superfetch and ReadybooT work great (XP's prefetch was not so hot and actually did consume needed resources unlike Superfetch), much better networking and memory managment than any previous Windows OS, and though I came onto Vista post SP1, XP was never without its own set of glitches - Vista has been stable as a rock for me. XP still freezes up, even today, on my 5 year old desktop.

I suspect the anti-Vista crowd tried to use it on insufficient hardware (something it was never intended to do) and or never took the time to get to understand how significanlty different it is than XP.

Guess it comes down to what works for you. If W7 is even faster and offers additional improvement, you bet I'll switch.

But I digress. Most of Vista's perceived bloat runs in the background, unlike some things do in XP, and should not be hindering boot up time or applications. My system idles from 0-3% CPU load (from sidebar mostly) and is not sufferingfrom a shortage of RAM (used to have CAD RAM errors under XP all the time).

Just say no to XP style tweaks in Vista - it is not the same thing.

 

Indeed, good question. From what little I understand of the guts of XP and _Vista, a lot of those anonymous service host processes are frequently part of one of the worker threads spawned by the kernel that do a lot of the basic work for user apps, such as handling deferred procedure calls and whatnot - in which case, if there really are too many service processes running, it may be more an indication of poorly written applications rather than a poorly written OS.

 

There are services for windows media player that load up when your pc loads up, unless you disable it(For my HP that is).

 

Well there are services which are of no use that can be disabled quite safely as far as I'm aware.
For example readyboost on a laptop with 4GB of RAM (32 Bit system) - it does absolutely nothing except running in the background...

Adobe file management/watching is a service and not everybody needs/wants that...

Then Roxio (comes with Blackberry) contains a peer to peer client - I don't need/want that, so that's another service gone.

Service tweaking can be useful.

 

the biggest gain for me was not disabling services (i still have the default configuration from dvd installation). it was removing unneccessary hardware.

a typical consumer pc has tons of connectors for anything. card readers, usb hubs for external usbs, special connectors, etc. i plugged all of them out, gave me 2min reduction in boottime. now at around 30sec from poweron (or a bit more than 20sec for vista itself).

 

No, it does absolutely nothing, period. So, yes, for the configuration you mention it won't hurt to disable it, but it won't do you any good either. That meets my definition of "waste of time".

Notice that those are application services that you installed, so these have nothing to do with Vista per se.

Like I said, some third-party providers clobber your machine with some really atrocious garbage (don't even get me started on HP's printer drivers... ), and for those cases it is a good idea to watch what services get installed by third-party applications. The same is not true for Vista native services.

 

I know, but that was not the point...

 

Well, typically compalints about multiple instances of svchost come from people who do not understand what this process does. Characteristically, there was no answer from the OP on this.

 

Actually if you disable ReadbooST then ReadybooT won't work, which is detrimental to boot performance - so that is a mistake.

Point is that there is no significant performance gain to disabling services. Vista is not XP. If you are not using a service, it is consuming no significant system resources.

 

The multiple processor boot is still awesome though

 

Well, everyone should watch the video. It clears up a lot of myths about tweaking Vista.

 

Well services added by random software aren't required - and these can definitely be removed if you don't use them.

Readyboot? What's that?
And nothing is dependant on Readyboost (in the "dependant on list)

 

'READYBOOT
Not to be confused with ReadyBoost, ReadyBoot is another feature designed to use memory to optimize the boot process, but ReadyBoot uses normal system RAM to do this rather than an external device. After every bootup, ReadyBoot calculates a caching plan for the next boot and stores part of this information under the \Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot folder, and part of the Registry. The end result is that each time you boot up Vista, ReadyBoot can improve boot times through the use of this cache. After bootup the memory used for caching is automatically freed up after 90 seconds, or sooner if required.

Importantly, ReadyBoot relies on the ReadyBoost Service to function, so you should not disable this service even if you don’t use ReadyBoost; it should be left on Automatic.'

 

According to the video, the dynamic aspects of ReadyBoot optimizes the boot process over several days of use and multiple boots - boot time should decrease after multiple startups. It also optimizes the boot file into a sequential stream.

 

From what I've read, and I think it was confirmed in the video, the multi processor function in the advanced boot tab of msconfig does not start to work until the bios hands over to the OS. Leaving this unchecked does not inhibit the processors and should only be used to turn off a processor for trouble shooting purposes.

It does not affect boot time. Made no difference on my system boot time whether checked for 2 or unchecked.

If you Google the subject you will find the facts and the fantasy.

 

You should most certainly uninstall unnecessary bloatwear and startup applications.

 

Disabling the readyboost service actually slows down your pc, even if you have 3 or more gb of ram.

 

Hmm... this sounds interesting.

I'll try turning it back on then...

By the way:
Some things you cannot deinstal - for example the adobe active file monitor or the Roxio peer to peer manager that I don'T need.,

 

My only issue is that it'd just be kinda nice if the svchost instances stated clearly what they had been spawned by.

I did however give up op tweaking Windows services a long time ago after coming to pretty much the same conclusions, the only things I bother disabling nowadays are the third party pointless services every application and its dog insists on installing.

 

If you use Process Explorer from Microsoft it will give a little more insight as to all of the SVCHOSTs are doing. It would be nice if they could integrate this into the regular task manager.

 

I haven't watched the video but you guys are all saying that disabling services doesn't improve boot up time or anything, then why would sites like BlackViper and tweakxp and etc. go through the hassle of listing which ones are safe to disable, tweaked, or bare bones?

I can tell you for a fact that after disabling services my computer started up much faster.
I'm not doubting that what you say isn't true, but I'm still not buying it.

 

hmm, only problem is any dumb computer user will start terminating stuff at will then...

svchost keeps important stuff hidden from the people who don't need to know

 

They can already do this now with the current task manager. At least with a process explorer built in they might learn.

 

Ahh, that's an excellent question, of course. I think the answer lies in the myths and mysteries of tweaking, and the (bogus) sense of mastery some people get from messing around with somewhat hidden system internals. Show me a self-declared "power user" and I'll show you somebody who doesn't know what s/he is talking about...

And yes, disabling lots of services will lead to faster startup times, since all these services will get loaded into memory at least once before they are sent to sleep if they have nothing to do. But the question is whether you really gain significant benefits from shaving off a few seconds off of your boot time. Once the system is booted and operating normally, you will see no benefits. At this point the question is how you work with your system (a question that came up frequently in the video that spawned this thread): If all you do is reboot your system all day in between "tweaking", then yes, you will get a sense of satisfaction from such activity. However, if you do actual work on the computer, then I'd say, don't bother.

 

Or it gets them confused a la UK teaching style.

Mention one add on - the teacher comes along - no, we ignore that, it'll only confuse people...

 

Well, I follow my own philosophy as to, if you don't need it, trash it. So services that don't affect me or I don't use, I disable them, regardless. It just happens it helps my boot time, so even more power for me to do so.

And I agree with that you won't see performance gains when actually working on your computer. Those few extra services don't take up much resources. Only benefit is boot time, which I like to have as low as possible.

 

Subtle slam? In any case, generic processes that fail to describe their purpose are simply poor design.

 

Well, since one instance of svchost.exe can be handling any number of different services, how should it identify itself? By the first service on the list, by all of them, or...? Since svchost is basically a jack-of-all-trades process that can be spun off by the OS to handle all manner of things that need handling, it seems to me that it is perfectly well identified - it's the process that handles services for the host - svchost.

At any rate, for those who want to know, Microsoft KB article KB314056 elucidates the topic slightly, and provides some mechanisms for determining what service(s) a particular instance of svchost.exe is handling.

 

Yeah, the fact it's not included by default has always been a tad puzzling.

It's not like they'd need to overwhelm the average user either, just stick it in as a disabled by default option.

Oh, and revising their current services system would also help, I'm not quite sure what the point of the manual startup option is when 90% of the time an application requesting a service that's set to manual never actually seems to work.

 

There are some services that may be causing problems and slowing boot times - IPv6 for instance. If your network does not support this protocol yet, your computer (the client) may be hesitating establishment of the network connection because it is waiting for v6 confirmation. If you know your network does not support this protocol, it may help to disable this service.

I have disabled anything to do with remote access for improved security - and I don't use remote desktop functions. I need most other network services but 'Workgroup' if not needed could theoretically delay network connections as well.

Network issues are often responsible for long boot times.

Services by themselves could only be reponsible for a few seconds of boot time. Most that are not needed right away don't even start. Indescriminate disabling may severely reduce functionality and hinder the dynamic optimization aspects of Vista.

Too many have disabled ReadyBoost without realizing the system degradation impact this has, even when equipped with sufficient RAM and not using flash memory devices.

I set out looking for facts about so called tweaks when my system performance seemed to get worse after following various tweaking advice and I came across this video and other 'truths'. Fact is, Vista does not function the same way as XP and everything you thought you knew after ten years of Windows OS's simply does not directly apply to Vista.

The best thing you can do for Vista is have enough RAM and compatible hardware. Same was true when XP came out. If you load Vista on an old XP machine you will be dissapointed with its' performance. After that, get rid of unneeded start up programs completely, any bloatwear you do not want, and shut down unused hardware (like the wired ethernet adapter if you don't need it) to improve boot time [if boot time is of primary concern to you].

Other than what I have discussed, my system is not "tweaked" and boots up in under 36 seconds with my home wireless connection established.

Vista on current hardware is, IMO, a step in the right direction away from XP.

 

Hah! I just took my own advice and disabled some unneeded hardware in Device Manager. Shaved another 3 seconds (now 33) off my boot time. Much greater affect on boot time than disabling services ever had.

All in fun of course but has little actual impact on my daily use habits- and now I'm gonna have to remember I did that when I go to hook something up in the future that won't uPnP!

Cheers!

 

For guys here wanting to cut down start up time, what are you going to achieve in life in those 30-40 sec?

 

I'm sorry but who doesn't want a low boot time unless you're a avid hibernate/sleep user. I'm a student so I often carry my notebook a lot. I don't want to have to wait 1 minute+ to get started on my work or whatever.

 

But if that is the case, why don't you use sleep instead of shutdown? Your laptop will wake from sleep in probably less than 10 seconds (if it's a reasonably modern machine, then less than five is more likely). Assuming sleep works on your machine, that is the way to go; and if you're not sure, then it's worth a try.

 

Do you guys actually turn off your pcs ?!

Would probably have a few years of uptime if it wasnt for the windows updates

 

Sleep uses battery. Although very little. No thanks.

 

I don't turn off my desktop pc, unless updates and whatnot. My laptop gets turned off all the time.