With windows search 4 and full indexing I felt like my system was going to burn up as they were chugging for hours on end no matter what I was doing. That’s what spurred me to just shut them down. I don’t like hearing that grinding (computer next to my head) for hours & hours on end (but I have 5 HD’s and ~1.5 terabyte of disk use, mostly small to mid-size files).
I agree, I turned off indexing for the same reason. My computer is pretty close to silent with just the fans going, but with indexing on the hard drives were just rattling on for long periods of time at all hours of the day. It was very annoying.
While amusing this is really completely irrelevant if you don’t happen to run critical database programs on such a volume…
So if you’re not running an ancient database on said drive, then there’s nothing to worry about with this option… if you have an excellent UPS & battery backup? Or would it pose a risk to my games too?
Jeff, I don’t recommend that you enable this option because there’s always a small risk due to hardware failure or other crashes, and the performance impact on gaming should be very small anyway. Personally I’m not worried because I accept the small chance of data corruption but if you’re anxious enough to ask these questions and keep a UPS with battery backup then you definitely should just leave this option disabled.
Windows Search is very smart about only searching when the system is idle. So even if it seems like it’s spending a lot of the system’s power grinding on your hard drives, in reality, it’s only doing it when you stop to read what’s on the screen, etc.
Also, Jeff, if you let the search run for a while (and it might be quite a while with 1 TB), it’ll eventually index your whole system. Once it’s build the full index, it’ll spend much less time actively updating your index. So if you leave your system on for a day or two with indexing active, it should get much better.
If you have a lot of documents (as I do), Windows Search is so handy I can’t imagine disabling it.
Speaking of PowerToys, the decision was made not to release them for Vista a couple of years ago. I was rather disappointed in the lack of user outcry.
Is there any benefit to going with a defragged single size swap file like you could in Win XP… I’d defrag my HD with no swap file then create an unchangeable file-size of 3 gig (with 4 Gig of RAM).
Will that help in Vista as well?
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Go over all of the default scheduled, turning off what you don’t want/need, or mving their scheduled time to a time when you’re not using the computer
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Go over all of your services, preferably with Black Viper’s Vista service tweak site
Fantastic, thanks.
“I like being aggressively stupid." - Sarah Silverman
I didn’t mention CPU, did I? I specifically mentioned memory usage.
More or less the real reason to disable Glass is if you are annoyed with desktop compositing disabling itself and turning itself back on every time you want to play Torment or Fallout. :)
I don’t know about his Vista guide but the XP guide was very easy to screw up your PC by disabling services that your applications (some that support your device functionality) actually needed.
You used the word “resources”. Besides are you using all of the memory in your system that suddenly 40 megs or so is a problem? You argument for disabling Glass is still wrong. It’s one of those “I hate it and so should you!” arguments that do more harm than good.
It’s very important to spend hours pouring over these tweaks and guides, disabling stuff, defragmenting Terabytes of harddrive space all to get rid of perhaps 100 perhaps a couple of hundred megs of running programs, so you can experience a 0,1 percent speed increase on your system.
… that is if time has no value to you.
Or they value different things than you.
Sometimes, doing that stuff is fun.
How does it “do more harm than good”? Aren’t you just epousing the flipside here, “I like it so stop criticising it in any way”?
… and the answer is yes, I like to play games that take up 2GB of RAM on their own, and at the same time be running BitTorrent, FilePlanet Downloader, have a Firefox open for a GameFAQ, XFire open for taking screencaps or doing voice-chat or IM in-game, and enough to spare to open IRC, text editor, etc without having to swap to disk incessantly. This scenario isn’t the “important”, but it’s “interesting” to me. Something “not interesting” would be having 1000 tabs open in Firefox 2, which aggressively gobbles up your RAM, and Outlook, which routinely grabs up 300MB at once.
My argument for disabling Glass is that it causes annoyances for playing old games and it chews up some resources (RAM) without really proving its usefulness to me. The same goes for the Sidebar, whose bundled CPU/Memory monitor in particular chews up about 2-5% CPU while lowly Task Manager minimized chews up 0-1%, and it’s obtrusive by chewing up screen real-estate (and not only doesn’t have a toggle hot-key but has poor auto-hide behavior).
Frankly, I dislike Sidebar more than Glass (I don’t have horizontal screen space to waste, as I don’t have a widescreen monitor) but Aero Glass tends to be more annoying to me by turning itself on and off all the time. If it’s off half the time because I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 2 and reading a walkthrough in a browser while I’m tabbed out, then I don’t see why I should bother with it at all. :P
Hey, I don’t think you’re stupid.
Anyone have any feelings on a permanent swapfile vs. a dynamic one?
I’m not sure about where you’ve tested things like that, but on my computer, when compositing turns itself off/on due to some other program wanting to make use of the GPU, it’s fast enough that it literally blinks the window borders for a second and that’s all there is to it… and even if it were longer than that, I don’t think it’s something I’d get all huffy or annoyed at using Vista over.
I’m not annoyed at using Vista. Just Glass. :) I’ve been using Vista since RTM first came out and I got it off MSDN to test with (there are some security features that I was very interested in due to work related things).
No. I don’t use Glass, I don’t like the way it looks. But that’s decision I’ve made based on my personal taste. You’re giving (bogus) advices based on your taste trying to mask them with tech-babble about resources.
… and the answer is yes, I like to play games that take up 2GB of RAM on their own, and at the same time be running BitTorrent, FilePlanet (…)
Awesome. Glass unloads from memory when you launch fullscreen game. Anything else?
My argument for disabling Glass is that it causes annoyances for playing old games and it chews up some resources (RAM) without really proving its usefulness to me.
Perhaps now it is. Your argument however was based on different premise and was bogus. But at least this time around you added “to me”.