Also consider toolbars, add-ons and plugins for browsers. Forgot that one.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Having worked through them all including a defrag, the machine is much faster now.

wingco1 do you know what gave the best increase in performance?

I can't really say to be honest. I removed unwanted progs and ran ccleaner files and registry after each uninstall. Checked everything else, then ran the built in Disk Cleaner followed by the defragger.

Only then did I restart the computer to see the improvement.

I have to disagree with your assumptions that disabling Windows services improves performance. In reality is is extremely marginal, all Windows services are extremely well optimized and disabling the odd few isn't really going to give much performance improvement.

In your opinion.

Look at it this way. If the service is not needed, why is it enabled? For those of us that know our way around a system, it's no great hardship to disable or reduce the settings for them, and it does improve some boot time aspects if the services are not being called on.

At present I have a 159 services listed, with 45 started (32 auto, 3 auto DS, 10 manual). 52 disabled. The rest are manual or Auto DS and have not started.

So less than a third started, and about a third disabled. The system is fine (and fast).

Forgot to add. Disabling the unneeded services frees up memory, which means for a faster system too.

You forgot to add;
Delete the contents of C:\Windows\Prefetch. This is possibly the single best thing you can do.
You can use regedit to disable the prefetch. I find this helps overall.

Also delete the contents of the Temp directories. Use Disk cleanup to do this.

The Windows defrag program only defrags user files, it doesnt touch system files. You should use a different program like Perfect DIsk to defrag the system files. Defragging system files usually works well.

That advice is mistaken.

In reply to a post by haggismn:

You forgot to add;
Delete the contents of C:\Windows\Prefetch. This is possibly the single best thing you can do.
You can use regedit to disable the prefetch. I find this helps overall.

Pre-fetch should not be disabled, cleaned or the rest. It is designed to clean itself out periodically, and is used to pre-guess at what users use most often and caches them. The same goes for Vista's Superfetch.

Looking at my prefetch folder file (layout.ini) I see the first items are:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\NTOSKRNL.EXE
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\PSHED.DLL
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\KDCOM.DLL
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CLFS.SYS

The first is kernel, memory management and initialisation. Next is a hardware error driver file. Next is a kernel debugger, and the last is Common Log File System driver.

All are pretty good to have at the start of a boot-up. As you open and use files, they get added to the list. Their height on the list depends on their usage frequency and how recently they were used.

A good link on prefetch/superfetch:

http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/SuperFetch_How_it_...

If you clean out prefetch/superfetch, the system will have to go through some default boot order, rather than one suited to the user. Systems with multiple users, will probably not benefit much from Superfetch if their usage habits are pretty different.


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Another myth is that Readyboost is useless. It's designed for adding a USB drive to be permanently used as added (slower) RAM. Said drive must be compatible, and it's generally only worthwhile with systems of under 1 - 1.5GB RAM. I think Readyboost was included to encourage folk to use their older systems and get away from XP, which used far less RAM).