The problem I was having is that my XP machine on the same network gets a sub 100ms ping but this Windows 7 machine was getting well over 200ms pings.
Which is fine if your goal was to get the fastest pings possible. But thats typically not what you want, you want to increase the speed of downloads, online games, etc. In which case your computers ack behavior isn’t going to impact your performance. And the penalty of setting this (more packets on the wire) could actually detract from performance if your bottleneck is throughput (say your cable modem) which now has to deal with your chatty computer asking for packet checking more frequently.
What’s the collective take on SuperFetch these days? I’m trying to get a new Win7 pro 64-bit install up and running for audio production stuff (Cubase 5, Kontakt 3.5, lots of other plugs). The big lure of Win7 for me was the ability to access more RAM for sample playback, so I’ve currently got 8GB in there. Win7 likes to keep around 2GB of that tied up with cached stuff.
From what I’ve read, Win7 prioritizes pretty well, so if a running application needs more RAM it will free up the cached memory accordingly. Do any of you guys have experience with this? Does SuperFetch pretty much do its job these days, or is it still conventional wisdom that gamers and other power users should disable it?
Of note is that Unlocker doesn’t seem to work on Win7 64-bit (I think 32-bit is fine).
The first thing I would do is install ChromePlus, which is like Chrome but built off Chromium so has less “phone home to Google” stuff and adds mouse gestures, AdBlock, and IE Tab. IE 8 is so freaking slow.
I believe the general opinion is ‘leave it be’. It tends to do the Right Thing*, and you end up hurting performance more times than not by messing with it. I’ve read the same thing about using external defraggers and such too. Let Win7 defrag in its weekly schedule and be done with it.
I had disabled SuperFetch when I first got Vista 64 and disabled all the automatic background stuff that made my hard disk grind to no end. Lately I’ve re-enabled it to offset MSE scanning delays, though, and found it doesn’t have as great an impact as I seem to recall. Maybe they improved the algorithm in a service pack, or maybe it’s the Intel storage drivers I installed…
I can’t speak for Vista, but the first few hours/days with Win7 will see quite a bit of HD activity, especially as you are (re)installing things. After enough time though, that will taper off as Win7 has cached/fetched/defragged/whatever else it needs to do and then it settles down into ‘maintenance’ mode.
If you are running with less than 2gb of memory though… it may not ever taper off enough to be satisfactory. I made the mistake of trying out Win7 on a 1GB system back in beta or whatever. Don’t do it :)
As was mentioned, the value of this is dubious. It will make ping requests return faster, but ping requests aren’t the actual data rate (or delay) of actual game data.
If memory serves, WoW uses TCP for most of its in-game networking and reducing acknowledgement frequency might actually speed up some in-game networking (and not just the ping graph). But it does increase the overhead for TCP communications. In a low-bandwidth game like WoW, where you have a lot of bandwidth to spare, it’s okay. In a game that uses UDP it might not do anything worthwhile at all (except improve the ping request and return speed). Changing the TCPAck frequency like that has been pretty reliably shown to reduce throughput on local networking - copying a big file over your local network to another machine may be slower.
Anyway, it’s an easy enough thing to go back and disable if you ever notice any problems. Just remember what you did. :)
Superfetch - just leave it. It’s so tempting to try to make Windows run better by enabling or disabling this or that, but with Win7 the defaults are really “good enough” and half the changes you might make will make one thing go faster but another thing go slower. Same goes for defrag - you shouldn’t really have to run it. Just leave it be, let it do it’s defrag on its default schedule in your computer’s downtime, things will be fine. Recoup that “monkeying around with Windows” time to do other things.
Hey, if it makes Left 4 Dead play smoother online then I could give up some file copy speed over the network.
Ohhh… Ah, sallam
This seems like a good place to post my WORLD-EXCLUSIVE first impressions of Windows 7, late by only a few months! (Ultimate 64-bit edition via MSDN, installed for a week now.)
Good stuff:
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UAC is now quiet enough that I can stick with the default account scheme, i.e. pseudo-admin with UAC enabled. Third-party programs catching up to the new access model probably also plays a part in why it’s much less annoying now.
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In 120 dpi mode, Windows no longer randomly changes the size of desktop icons between reboots. Can’t believe this took so long to fix.
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Getting a full-screen preview of each window as you hover on taskbar buttons or use the task switcher is nice. Haven’t used the left/right window docking trick much yet, but it looks useful too.
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The system becomes usable more quickly after a boot, and disk access in general seems much faster, even with MSE installed. I thought the big I/O subsystem revamping should have happened with Vista, but it’s like low-priority I/O finally works in W7.
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The new calculator is great! It’s a superset of the old Calculator powertoy for XP & Vista. Everyone should have a look at the new calculator!
Neutral stuff:
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The new default taskbar mode is useless. Always joining all program windows into a single icon with no text means that I always have to hover over the button to discover exactly which windows are there. I quickly went back to traditional mode, one button per window with text. For the same reason, I don’t use taskbar pinning at all – that would mean less space for the text I want to read.
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Hiding all tray icons by default was well-intentioned, and might be useful for poorly maintained laptops with dozens of malware icons. But I’m pretty careful about managing icon settings, and only show that handful of icons that I actually want to appear in the area, so the new feature just gets in my way and I disabled it pretty quickly.
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I recall the Windows team being proud that the old Windows 3.1 font installation dialog is gone. You know why? Because there’s no font installation dialog at all now, that’s why. Just right-clicking on a selected font files. Cheap… and annoying if you have lots of fonts to install, like I do.
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What exactly is the point of “Aero peek”? That feature where you hover over the right end of the taskbar, and the desktop appears – but you can’t interact with anything! Huh? I’d much rather have the desktop icon popup (that’s still available separately) integrated with this button.
Bad stuff:
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“My Documents” which had been renamed to “Documents” in Vista is now back to “My Documents”. WTF, Microsoft? Can’t you pick a name and stick with it? Also, my user folder contains not only the “My Documents” folder but also a junction to the “My Documents” folder, also called “My Documents”… in the same directory! Huh? Is that for 100% Vista compatibility, in case some idiot program was looking for a “My Documents” soft link instead of the directory itself?
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After installation Windows 7 did not recognize my Dell 2405 widescreen monitor… and the generic monitor driver did not offer me a widescreen resolution! Again, WTF? Worse, Dell does not offer a 64-bit driver for this model, so I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, installing the ATI graphics drivers also gave me the correct list of screen resolutions.
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Microsoft Update’s opinion of which drivers I need is comical, as usual. It misidentified my ATI 5850 as some older model, and tried to push a PCL 5 driver for my HP LaserJet 1202 on me… which then repeatedly failed to install, probably because I had already HP’s PostScript and PCL 6 drivers installed. That attempt finally stopped when I also installed HP’s PCL 5 drivers.
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The new troubleshooter is useless. Didn’t help me at all with those driver troubles, and when I accidentally picked a non-Aero desktop scheme and then asked the troubleshooter why I didn’t get Aero effects, it actually failed to identify this very basic issue!
All told Windows 7 feels like Vista SP3 to me. Not bad by any means, but the hype is rather exaggerated, and most likely a reaction to the endless badmouthing of Vista. Good upgrade for XP users but I’d hesitate to recommend the upgrade for Vista users who are happy with their systems.
I’m the same as you. I didn’t use it at all for about six months and then started using the keyboard shortcuts (win-arrowkey). I now use it all the time, and get super annoyed it doesn’t work for Putty.
- The new default taskbar mode is useless. Always joining all program windows into a single icon with no text means that I always have to hover over the button to discover exactly which windows are there. I quickly went back to traditional mode, one button per window with text. For the same reason, I don’t use taskbar pinning at all – that would mean less space for the text I want to read.
I felt the same, but stuck with it. After a while I simply get used to where each subwindow is in the submenu. I am continuously annoyed by a lack of ‘minimise/maximise everything in this group’ rclick menu items though (it’s in shift-rclick).
- What exactly is the point of “Aero peek”? That feature where you hover over the right end of the taskbar, and the desktop appears – but you can’t interact with anything! Huh? I’d much rather have the desktop icon popup (that’s still available separately) integrated with this button.
Show Desktop for dummies. I hate it too, especially since I move the mouse to the bottom right while watching movies, and get confused as hell when I alt-f4 the player only to see everything immediately vanish.
Aero Peek is good if, for instance, you have a clock, a to-do list, or other information embedded on the desktop (via Rainmeter or something like it) that’s generally covered up by other windows. Use the Win+Space hotkey to get a quick look at it, let it go, and everything’s back where it was instantly.
Taskbar pinning is awesome. It is the #1 thing I miss when I get stuck working on a non-Windows 7 computer.
The point of “Aero Peek” is to give you a preview of what is on your desktop prior to potentially doing a “Show Desktop” (which will happen if you click that area instead of just hovering over it). I don’t use it myself though, I find Windows-D as a toggle fast enough that there’s not really a reason to have “peek” as a separate thing from just showing the desktop.
Can’t you just copy the font files into C:\Windows\Fonts? This worked for me, but I only tried this on 32-bit Win7. (On some versions of Windows, it is/was necessary to view the contents of the fonts folder in explorer after copying the files, to trigger the installation.)
Anything that actually needs this, like a game, is smart enough to turn it off at runtime for itself.
Yes, you can. I’m pretty sure you could just copy the fonts into that directory even back in XP, so that’s not even a new Windows 7 thing.
You can also multi-select fonts and just issue the install command once… like go into a directory or search for your fonts, select all the ones you want to install and then right click “Install” and it’ll install them all.
Oh right, those desktop gadgets. That makes sense, if you’re using them. I haven’t enabled any of them so far myself.