I burst out laughing at the sheer arrogance of this statement. Bravo.
Or perhaps 3 GB is underpowered for whatever great and interesting stuff it is you do.
I have 6GB and happily use it for sidebar and if I could get animated lawn ornaments, I would. What I like about pcs today is the versatility and multitasking - i’m not a programmer and don’t do magic stuff that tasks my machine heavily.
But if I have something that’s really hungry, then I do know how to switch stuff off temporarily.
But if you like to have your desktop set up as the pc equivalent of pre-unification Eastern Germany, so it’s ready when it needs to give everything to that great compile, go ahead.
BS. Glass runs on GPU and decreases CPU load over regular skin.
- Disable indexing on my Hard Drives.
Why would you do that? Search is great. If you’re really that concerned about the performance, just adjust the directories it indexes. On Glass, use Switcher instead of the nigh-useless Flip3d. With SP1 I’m not seeing performance problems anymore.
BTW, turn on hard drive caching, but do NOT turn on anything like “advanced write performance” or “volume write-back cache.” Batteries stop power loss, but it’s virtually guaranteed your gaming box is going to lock up, and you can actually lose serious data with those enabled. Effectively they make it so when the OS or an application requests “no really, make sure this is written to disk right now, I have a reason” the OS lies and pretends.
That’s why I asked here. I had a ~50 teaks & regedits I’d do to a fresh install of XP and just figured an out of box Vista (after updates) just couldn’t be all that optimized - so was basing my decisions on what other people wrote.
I have done very little tweaking to my Vista system. The utils I linked above besides Teracopy add features and use up slightly more resources than less. Yes, I also echo NOT turning off the SATA thing.
Me neither. If you have anything with a PS 2.0 GPU there’s no reason not to run Aero. It’s fast and looks so much nicer than without. I love Switcher and I like the sidebar, too, now that there’s actually a good collection of gadgets for it. I have the weather, the calender, a really nice System monitor, a detailed network monitor, a little panel that gives me shortcuts to power down, reboot, hibernate, etc, an app launcher I use instead of the star menu of desktop for most things, and even a uTorrent gadget that monitors my downloads on the laptop across the room.
I understand there’s a tweaking mentality left over from the days of 95, 98, 2000 and XP, but it’s pretty silly to quibble about a few dozen megabytes here and there or a fraction of a percent of CPU usage on any system suitable for Vista in the first place. In my box with 4 GBs of RAM I perpetually have half that free during normal usage with browsers, iTunes, video players and Office apps running. And it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to expect your CPU usage to be at 0% all the time.
Is it? I wouldn’t know, I never use Windows Search. I always know exactly know which files I want to search, and then I search directly from within Total Commander or Visual Studio.
BTW, turn on hard drive caching, but do NOT turn on anything like “advanced write performance” or “volume write-back cache.”
Bah humbug! Advanced Write Performance is great and justly punishes you for not making regular backups. No risk, no fun!
…or no UPS. Buncha pussies, I tell ya.
I’m sorry, but Macaffe fucking sucks. Took up 50% of cpu on my mom’s computer. Just restricting her user rights to generic user does way more to protect her system than Macaffee. As a developer, having random locks on files while building and a whole host of IO locks and massive cpu utilization on your system sucks.
My answer was geared for people who know how computers work. People that run as admin and run random exes get what they deserve. Ildasm and bindump are your friends.
bago’s responses here are just bizarre… but, really, don’t take it from us… he’s a software developer, who knows how computers work™. Maybe you should start doing your software development on your own computer rather than your mom’s, I guess?
Bago and I can’t be the only people that don’t use antivirus software or a firewall. I haven’t had either on my machine for … I guess about 5 years? Once every 8 months or a year, I will run a scan of some kind, but I routinely visit all the kinds of websites that you guys are afraid of and have never had any problems. Active-monitoring antivirus and anti-spyware software use a crazy amount of resources, and software firewalls are annoying. Those things are unnecessary.
I’ve typically had an anti-virus installed, but just used it to scan downloaded files as needed and regular off-hours full system scans, with the active scanning disabled. It’s helped a couple times, at least (e.g., I found a tool that was supposed to remove a desktop depth check on an old game so I didn’t have to switch back to 16-bit mode every time I played, but it was infected).
It is annoying when the false positives make me even more paranoid than usual, though.
Some hilarious backstory on “Enable advanced performance”, by the way.
A database program may use the Com*mit function to establish points at which the state of the file on disk is in agreement with what the program expects to be on the disk. If the computer loses power during an update, the database program can use the information recorded at the last commit point to re-establish the integrity of the database. If Commit returned immediately before the commit was complete, then this integrity checkpoint would be lost. The result was that your database became corrupted. Why was this option available if the consequences were so awful? The reason: a bug in Windows® 3.11.
Hey guys, thanks for opening my eyes and saving my butt on that one.
@Jason McCullough: that’s why you put badly written “database” apps on a separate volume (or at least their data store). Another option is to stop using applications written around Windows 3.11 era but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a very popular solution. After all 15 years for a piece of software is not that long…
You’d be surprised what you have to support for back-compatibility reasons if you’re Windows. It’s the bane of Raymond’s existence, judging by his blog.
Oh yeah, a BIG slowdown for me on my uber-system in Vista’s auto-searching Start menu was the option “highlight newly installed programs” for some reason.
Turn “highlight newly installed programs” OFF.
Jason McCullough: believe me, I would not. This is Vista thread and article linked by you reminded me of an uproar caused by the fact that Vista dropped some of the ancient back-compat. I’ve seen people calling names because their 15 year old HLP file doesn’t work, or some piece of software written 10 years ago that comes in a form of 16-bit installer won’t run on 64-bit OS. Flush advice was real, the latter part of my post was cynical.
Or better yet, turn off the Vista start menu. (Which is to say, revert to the “classic” start menu. Which is infinitely less obtuse.)