Vista Tweakers Should Watch This First

I rarely turn mine off, ofc i bought it as a desktop replacement so its a bit tricky to carry it around all the time

In a worst case scenario that i have to "turn it off" i basically use stand by, takes like 3-4 secs after that to get back to the login screen which isnt that bad.

 

So? Who cares, your average laptop can typically sleep for a week on battery, and you can set the system to automatically hibernate if it runs low on battery while sleeping.

 

K that's nice. However I don't care for it. My laptop boots under 30 seconds, and I'm fine with that. I rather have it waste AS LITTLE battery as it can.

 

Fine, be that way...

 

Haha this is pretty funny all this bickering over whether to sleep, shutdown, or leave on. I leave everything on because I like to push all my hardware all the time. I guess since I do a lot of server work I feel downtime should be avoided.

 

What, not everyone uses Hybrid Sleep?!!!

 

But repeated start ups/ shut downs drain the battery more instead of sleep.

 

I don't turn it on and off THAT much. 2-3 times a day.

 

FYI

msconfig number of processors is editing the optional switches that are used in your boot configuration file. The processor switch does this:


/numproc=number

This switch sets the number of processors that Windows will run at startup. With this switch, you can force a multiprocessor system to use only the quantity of processors (number) that you specify. This switch can help you troubleshoot performance problems and defective CPUs.

There are no performance or any other gains by changing the default setting. There could be issues, however. Vista will use fully all available processors once it enters kernel mode at the end of startup, no matter what you set for the number of processors in MSCONFIG.

This does not enable multi-processor boot or speed up boot processing.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;833721

 

I bet that is significantly more drain than letting it sleep for several hours. You might want to do some tests to see exactly how much power it takes to power up and down three times. Then see how much power is consumed in sleep mode for an hour. Then do the math.

Gary

 

Yeah I've been putting it on standby now during the day, and there's just no need to b**** about boot-up times when you standby. Turn on, it restarts explorer and I'm ready to go in 5 seconds. I only shut down on dangerously low battery, but then on that kind of battery there's no reason to not be plugged in any way.

 

It cut my boot time drastically 0.o

 

Mine is the same w/ numproc = 2, 6 XP bars go by and it loads.

 

Despite the fact that the authors of the operating system clearly state that the switch has ZERO, NADA, ZILCH effect on boot up, and that it's sole purpose is for testing/diagnostics??? Without the switch the OS will utilize all available processes. The switch is there to throttle back that mode of operation.

Gary

 

Microsoft also stated that vista is the most stable version of windows yet.

We all know thats not true.

 

Oh I see, your reply rather than to give some supporting facts is to answer with some non sequitur. This urban myth about the processor switch has been around for a long time and has been debunked numerous times. If you have some counter proof, by all means please produce it. I am sure Microsoft and many others would be interested in it.

Oh, by the way, for most of us who don't pretend to know more about the OS than the folks who write them and don't fiddle about in things we don't understand, Vista has been the most stable version of Windows yet.

Gary

 

The whole 5 years i had xp i had not a single bluescreen. First day of using vista i had a bluescreen and have countless others since. Explorer crashes about twice a week and i've barely tweaked this install, only enabled multiprocessor boot.

My proof for the multi-processor boot is that it shaved off at least 5-6 seconds on my boot time.

I don't pretend to know more than microsoft i merely stated they lie alot.

 

Gary,


This phrase is simply a way of expressing your frustration. Most of your posts have been professional but this one is more of a cry out. Similar to the one you mentioned about Creative and Vista. You are not the majority. NBR is not the majority. Just because you had good experience with Vista it does not make it the most stable OS ever. Set up the following at home and you will curse all night because Vista does not work.

1. 5 XP SP3 pcs + 2 Nokia Communicators.
2. Wireless N NETGEAR router
3. ALL in one Printserver
4. HP ALL IN ONE
5. 1 TB FTP server.
6. Vista machine


The XPs and Nokia phones work flawlessly at home with my setup . My father's friend had a lappy with win 2000 and it worked in an instant with my setup.Do you think my U6 works in that setup? It does not. I spent nights trying to make it work. So, to follow your train of thought, personal experience, Vista does not allow me to do my work and use my set-up, it sucks. PERIOD.

 

Just on a note - could this discussion go back to the problem on hand?
This is turning into a fight.

XP definitely had its problems - I had several BSOD for that matter...
I also had BSOD on Vista.

Vista under SP1 is possibly more stable than XP, however, how do you actively measure stability?
You can't.

 

I wouldn't go far and say Vista with SP1 is more stable than XP.
It varies from machine to machine, so I'd say they are more on the same level instead of one being being superior than the other.

Although I will say this: XP in general has better support for older software compared to Vista and consumes less resources to effectively do the same thing in numerous aspects.

What essentially puzzles me is why doesn't MS put more effort into making their new OS's much more backward compatible regardless if it's a 32bit or 64bit OS you are running the application from?
They are bound to know that there are number of people who use older software for various purposes.
Oh btw ... Vista blundered a lot in being much larger (space wise) than XP.
What for exactly?
Windows 7 will have a smaller footprint than Vista and lesser hardware demands.
It's a great example of what MS can actually do with a new OS when it's properly optimized and garbage is taken out.

I consider Vista as a larger beta test.
And given the fact that MS was the one that made the video in question ... of course they will exaggerate in some aspects so they can defend their own product.
Fact remains though that various optimizations and turning off services works on some systems, while on others it does not.
So really it's a hit/miss situation.

 

You're comparing hardware/software support to stability there though.

 

Why don't you just put the computer to sleep? Showing up late by 40secs is not a big deal!!!

 

I'll bet Vista cleaned something else up that helped your boot time - or it had enough time to cache a boot file when you made this change. Try unchecking it and see if it makes any difference now. Don't forget to allow a few minutes between restarts to allow ReadyBoot to cache a new boot file, assuming you have not disabled the ReadyBoost service.

Makes no boot time difference on my system how I set numproc switch.

 

One thing I learned about tweaking is .. don't overdue it as it will eventually crash your system. Vista does a pretty darn good job managing itself and doesn't really need help. A fast boot time is not an indicator on how fast the computer will be when fully running. My best tweak to make the battery last longer is to disable the network card when I'm using wi-fi and enable it when I connect via cable. The multiple processor option when booting has been debunked because Vista itself uses all processors when it boots. Another way of tweaking is to disable startup programs in 'msconfig' for example disabling 'google updates', 'adobe updates', 'iTunes update' and others that you can do manually.

 

Speaking of management, Vista is such a spoil sport . I was trying to max out my RAMS and Vista, party pooper , started freeing up RAMS the more I opened aps . XP would have crashed . Hats off to the memory management

 

hmm good info

 

Oh no, another Vista/XP debate.

My two cents on the topic:
Thanks for the link, its great to see an informative video that further confirms/debunks some Vista tweaking practices. I never did any processors-at-boot up or services tweaks on my system as I (correctly) assumed that there was little to gain from it.

 

hm i can't, i have to first watch the video. which i do right now.

i had exactly 3 problems so far with vista. all 3 reproducable and avoidable. some where vistas fault, some not. but... (next quote)

i had 0 moments where one of my vista systems went out of control. that is eighter bluescreening away, or just locking up to unusability so you have to press the powerbutton to turn it off, or some other strange behaviour.

what i got used to in xp over the years to just happen from time to time with no determinable reason on all sort of hardware never yet happened on vista.

for me, that is how i actively measure stability.

bugs in vista:
one of my usb2midi cables has a vista driver that bluescreens the os when you plug it out while in use. a buggy driver (but vista shouldn't bluescreen anyways.. but it was before the days of sp1. have lost the cable.. ).

when ever i want to open a backup from the homeserver on a vista machine (unsure right now about xp) for the first time ever (so once for each machine) the loading of the backup hangs at 72% and the os has to turned off with the power button. it somehow hangs while trying to mount the virtual disk. no crash, but not even rebooting possible. a bug microsoft should've fixed long ago. but then again, only once per machine => manageable.

superfetch sometimes 'learns' strange stuff which results in prefetching into memory of files that are much too large for the memory, making a system close to unusable after booting (everytime). i have, for that reason, turned off superfetch on some systems where it failed. currently, all my systems have it enabled after the move to ssd as i made a clean install of each system.

besides those 3 things, there where 0 cases of "?! oh no!!" with all of my vista systems. i had tons of these on my xp machines (and still have right now) from simple gui-not-able-to-show-the-window while clicking on the taskbar button to stutterings to freezes. all very random, not really fixable due to that.


and vista had no need to tweak anything yet, unlike all of my xp machines. the only thing i had to fiddle with is superfetch.



and to the dude bashing vista because of his nokia thingens. get sony ericsson. i have no problem with the close-to-identical setup that you have. all with vista (and xp on the eee). so the fault is nokia. (i personally really dislike nokia. why not bash nokia for not supporting your configuration? you do bash microsoft for it. what should they care about strange phones?)

anyways, watching video (while i do know that in vista, tweaking may be fun, but is rather useless. it's what osx is praised to be. a system that works out of the box and works great)

 

Maybe its my uncanny ability to find that little problem then...

On a side note - Wishmaker told me MSN 2009 (RC2) has been stable for him for a few weeks - it took me all of a few seconds to crash it...

But back to stability - I think there are plenty of people who had no problems with XP (the ones who weren't doing anything with it apart from simply using it) and people with more problems than I had in Vista.

But I think we come to the sam conclusion.

 

problem is, when ever people have problems, it's windows fault. my bad boottime on my pc was not windows fault. it was the additional hw (card readers and such) drivers fault. plugging out those devices (which where built in) removed over 2 min of boottime. now, on a ssd raid0, i have 30sec boot time. before, it was 2.5min.

instability issues are the same. but this is the conclusion they get in the video as well: check out everything, measure everything and try out everything before deploying vista in an environment to a large user base. in the end, it will allways be vistas fault. even while it may by symantec security crap suite taking your system down, the card reader, or some games/audio cd's securom style rootkit.

there are tons of things that can go wrong. but it's often not vistas fault.

 

That is true.

 

so much writing, so little responce. still i'm happy

messing around with my notebook currently because of such issues (and try to listen to the movie at the same time)

 

I agree with everything you wrote previously. I just saw it a few seconds ago.

I couldn't have said this any better if I were you and typed the original statement.


I'll add that there is a general "boot time" fetish on NBR, if you really pay attention, and that just adds to the 'I hate Vista' fire. Go to any 'Vista vs. XP' thread or 'Windows 7 thread' or any other thread comparing or talking about the OS as a whole and it's littered with 'boot time' posts. I mean, there's even someone earlier in this thread who posted that his boot time makes him late to class by 30-40 seconds. Are we being serious here? Really? Maybe I'm just the one who doesn't get it. *scratches head in bewilderment*

 

Late to class by 30-40 seconds? How does that work...

Anyway.

2 minutes to boot up were OK for me - yes, less would be nice - but as long as I see my laptop is doing something (status bar moving, HDD light flashing) I'm not really bothered about a few more seconds or less.

Yes, its nice to have the computer feel fast loading - do I need it - no.

Anyway - where are we going?

And one quesion arises - if you have Readyboost enabled, have a fast bootup and then disable it, will your laptop stay at that fast bootup??

 

what matters for me is, what is fastest:

if hibernate is faster (low amount of ram) i hibernate.
if booting/shutdown is faster, i shutdown and start.
standby is always fastest but not always the option. my notebook battery doesn't work anymore and i like to be able to plug out my pc when turned off.

but yes, boot time is overrated (while it is an indicator that something is really wrong with your system if you have several minutes till system is up and working.)

i have cleaned up my xp installation at work lately (ccleaner, defraggler full defrag, and some reg defragmentation tool, as well as recreating my outlook profile after completely removing the old one). now xp is ready to work in about 3-5min less (highly fluctuating) and the hd stops fulltime blinking afterwards (which it never did during the whole day before).

i don't like tweaks, but certain cleanup can help much. i even deframgented my files on the ssd now for the first time. why? where a file is doesn't matter on an ssd, but if it's fragmented over 1000ds of particles, its still slower to read and was slower to write than if it would have been in one block.

have to check if it changed performance somehow

but tweaks are overrated. they are great in the right place, done right. but useless else.

 

^^^I absolutely, 100% agree that cleaning up your drive can make a noticeable, and sometimes even drastic, improvement to performance. That's why I do it all the time, and I'll always subscribe to it. When it comes to keeping the system clean, I'm almost anal about it. *Wait, can I say that here?*

I guess tweaking is just one of those things where perception becomes reality for most.

 

i remember the best tweak i did years ago. i had a p3 500mhz based system which felt slow and all. i bought a 19" tft which was close to half the price of all the new 17" tft around here (those days, even 15" wheren't cheap).

i took it home, plugged it in, and my pc was MUCH FASTER.

at least, it felt that way. the bigger picture, the much more crisp picture, and the higher res than what i had before on the crt made my win2000 so modern and so cool and so fast..

tweaks are about getting that stuff done that makes you feel good. but don't blame it on windows (or any other thing you tweak around with) if it doesn't work as well afterwards

that's why i still haven't used vlite to reduce the footprint of vista on my 32gb ssd. i prefer to have the system in it's correct state. i need to be able to trust the system. tweaks kill that option.

 

I hear you. This is why I have chosen to leave things the way they are. I guess once again the saying holds true: To each his or her own.