Detox Windows
Is your Windows 7 machine grinding to a halt already? Don’t despair as we’ll explain how to restore brand-new PC performance-and then go faster still.
There’s a lot to like about Windows 7, not least its many improvements over Vista: the new OS is faster, less demanding on resources, has better designed security and contains many new productivity-boosting features.
If you were an early Windows 7 adopter, though, you may already have noticed that one old problem still remains. The more you use your PC, adding and removing applications, the more junk builds up throughout your system, and the slower and more unstable it eventually becomes. You need to treat the problem, detoxing your PC on a regular basis to remove the leftovers – but how, exactly? Which areas of Windows 7 are most susceptible to this gradual degradation? Are there any tools or benchmarks you can use to reveal problem areas? How much can all this clutter slow you down, anyway, and what’s the best way to remove it all and restore your system to its optimum performance?
As we researched this article, one point was clear. Windows 7 is very different internally to Windows XP, and we couldn’t simply assume that old tricks, like optimising services, would work in the same way. What we needed to do was design a test, something that would reveal exactly why Windows 7 systems slowed down over time, and help uncover the best way to restore that initial new PC performance. And so that’s exactly what we did.
Designing the test
We started our trial by obtaining a powerful new 3XS Intel X58 Core i7 PC from Scan Computers. The machine featured a quad-core Intel Core i7 920 (which was overclocked by 20 per cent), 6MB of RAM and a speedy SATA 300 Samsung hard drive. It was an excellent performer that we knew wouldn’t choke unless it was faced with a set of major performance problems.
When the 3XS PC arrived, we installed the latest Windows 7 (Ultimate Edition, 32-bit) and driver updates and then set about establishing baseline measurements of our PC’s performance.
The best Windows boot time – which we’re defining as the time that elapses between the ‘Starting Windows’ message and the desktop appearing – was 22 seconds. Seeing the desktop means nothing if you can’t use it, so we also measured the time between the ‘Starting Windows’ message appearing and the point that we were able to launch IE and have it display our Google homepage (28 seconds).
We also used Task Manager to collect data on free memory and system activity (processes, threads, and so on). Finally we checked how long it took to launch apps, including Firefox and Outlook (both around four seconds).
With the performance of our clean system safely defined, we set about abusing it. We installed Windows Live tools, iTunes, Adobe Reader, browsers, antivirus apps, Microsoft Office, DVD-burning suites, video-editing tools, a large Outlook inbox, hundreds of fonts and more. We accepted every extra that was on offer, then reinstalled and updated the apps before moving plenty of files around to ensure hard drive fragmentation.
Installing apps like iTunes can slow down your system performance in several different ways.
And what did this do to the benchmarks? The plain Windows boot time increased by around a third, from 22 to 30 seconds. Our system was unusable after that for a long time, though, with IE not displaying Google for 140 seconds. Task Manager showed that system activity had more than doubled. Outlook now took five times as long to launch (21 seconds), and shutdown time increased by 50 per cent to 18 seconds.
So even a powerhouse like our 3XS system can be seriously affected by clutter. Now our really important tests began: discovering how to reverse this slowdown.
Defrag options
The hard drive is a big bottleneck on most PCs, and defragging has traditionally been one way to boost performance. Windows 7’s own defrag tool completed the task in a little over 20 minutes, confidently reporting that there was now 0 per cent fragmentation. But this had little effect on our PC, shaving one second off boot time and leaving other benchmarks unaffected. We weren’t convinced, and ran Auslogics Disk Defrag immediately afterwards. This produced some interesting information: it thought our drive was still 16 per cent fragmented. We told the program to optimise our file layout (go to ‘Settings | Program Settings | Algorithms | Move system files to the beginning of the disk’) and set it to work.
Auslogics Disk Defrag optimised the layout of files on your hard drive and gave a real speed improvement as a result.
This delivered real benefits. Boot time fell from 29 to 26 seconds; IE was usable after 107 seconds, a 23 per cent improvement; and launch time for Outlook fell by a third. We can’t guarantee you’ll see similar results, as every defrag situation is different, but it’s clear that Windows 7’s defrag tool alone won’t necessarily do the job. We advise you click Start, type defrag, click ‘Disk Defragmenter’ and make sure that scheduled defrags are turned off for the moment. Then install Auslogics Disk Defrag, turn on the option to relocate your system files, click ‘Settings | Program Settings | Schedule’ and set it to run every few days to keep your drive running optimally.
At your service
A near two-minute wait before we could access the web was far too long. To cut this down we needed to reduce the work that Windows had to do during the boot process, and one effective way to do this was to work on our Windows services. Launching the Services applet (‘services.msc’) revealed the many changes that could be made.
For instance, the Distributed Link Tracking Client maintains links between NTFS files across a network and is started by default. We don’t use the service, though, and you probably don’t either: double-clicking it and setting the Startup Type to ‘Disabled’ will turn it off. IP Helper is similarly pointless unless you have access to an IP6 network, and the Windows Media Player Network Sharing and Media Center Extender services can go unless you’re using them to share your music and videos.
Other services can be configured to start with a delay, giving priority to other tasks and helping your PC to become usable more quickly. The Background Intelligent Transfer Service is important when downloading Windows Updates, but it doesn’t have to be available when you start your PC. Double-click this and set its Startup Type to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’. Try the same with Disk Defragmenter, Windows Backup, Windows Search and Windows Update.
We noticed many unnecessary third-party services. Installing Nero 9 got us a Nero BackItUp Scheduler 4.0 service, for example; a LightScribe service assists when labelling discs; and a Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger had appeared from somewhere. We weren’t using any of these, so we disabled them all.
Many more could safely have their start-up type set to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’: Apple Mobile Device (bundled with iTunes), seven SQL Server services and five from VMware (part of VMware Workstation) all got this treatment. (Don’t choose anything security-related, though: vital services relating to firewalls or antivirus tools must be allowed to start as quickly as possible.)
These changes worked well, cutting our raw boot time from 26 to 24 seconds, while the ‘IE-usable’ time plummeted from 107 to 81 seconds: a significant improvement. But there was more to come.
Startup simplifications
Filling up a PC with numerous start-up programs will really slow it down, yet software authors continue to do this by default, so it’s a good idea to prune your start-up tasks on a regular basis.
Start by quickly browsing your ‘Start | All Programs’ menu. Is there anything you no longer need? Uninstall it now.
Next, we launched msconfig on our test PC, clicked the Startup tab and found 29 programs listed, many of them unnecessary. QuickTime, iTunes, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat, Orbit Downloader, PowerDVD and RealPlayer are all very useful tools, but we didn’t want any of them to launch at boot time.
Other applications install some components that may or may not be useful to you. GoogleToolbarNotifier protects your Google toolbar search settings from unauthorised changes, for instance: that might be handy in some cases, but you may already have antivirus software that does something similar. Magix Movie Editor had added an application called Trayserver that appeared to be unnecessary, and our Cyberlink software had installed a host of tools that seemed less than essential, including ‘cyberlink brs’ (something to do with Blu-ray, apparently), Cyberlink MediaLibrary Service, the Language Application, the StartMen Application and the MUI StartMenu Application.
There may be a few redundant start-up programs that have been there since your PC arrived. Ours included LightScribe, a disc-labelling tool that we weren’t using, and CTXfiHlp, a Creative tool that apparently assists with providing Help functionality, but as we’ve yet to need that, the program felt like something we could do without. Another we found was LG Firmware Update, which checks online for new DVD drive firmware. That’s handy, but we don’t need to run it every boot. However, if you turn this off, make sure that you run it manually regularly.
A program to check for DVD firmware updates is useful, but you don’t need to run it at every boot. Disable this to save some time.
The precise results of all this tweaking will depend on how your PC is configured, but we saw immediate benefits. There was less disk thrashing at boot time, IE was now usable in only 71 seconds, and we’d freed up more than 100MB of RAM for the rest of our system.
Optimise your apps
We’ve concentrated on cleaning up Windows clutter, but your apps can also collect pointless add-ons.
Take Internet Explorer, for instance. While installing software, we accepted every offer of a shiny new IE add-on, with the result being that we now had four extra toolbars. Clicking ‘Tools | Manage Add-ons’ and disabling these freed up a surprisingly high 28 to 36MB of RAM, cut four seconds off the time it took for IE to load and then shaved half a second off every subsequent relaunch.
Typical Microsoft inefficiency? Apparently not. We had also accumulated eight Firefox extensions – AdBlock Plus, DownloadThemAll and so on – and uninstalling those halved the browser’s relaunch time and saved us around 26MB of RAM. So by all means keep the extensions you use, but remember that they come at a price – get rid of any that are surplus to requirements.
It’s a similar story with Microsoft Office. Outlook 2007, for instance, comes with many unnecessary add-ons, and programs like iTunes will install more (without even asking). Disabling all but the key search add-on saved 19MB of RAM on our test system (see the ‘Optimising Outlook’ box for the details), and while the initial launch appeared little different, subsequent launches now required only around 0.4 seconds. Clear unwanted emails out of your inbox for a further speed boost, then check Word, Excel and other Office components for further unnecessary add-ons (though don’t remove anything unless you’re sure you don’t need it).
Clean up your system
Congratulations, you’ve done the hard work – it’s time to clean up. Click Start, type cleanmgr and press [Enter] to launch Disk Cleanup. Follow the instructions and clean up as much of the junk that it finds as you can.
You can get more thorough clean-up help from a tool like CCleaner. It’s not a magic solution – we tried it, and cleaning our Registry made no difference at all to any benchmarks – but it does give you a central place to clean up your browser’s temporary files. That really did help, cutting another five seconds off the time it took IE to load and become usable.
After one further defrag to take advantage of our additional free hard drive space, that was it. So what had our efforts achieved?
Boot time, originally 22 seconds, had initially risen to 30, but we’d brought it back down to 24. The time it took IE to load and display Google, first 28 and at its height a horrible 140 seconds, was now 35.
Initial launch times for Outlook and Firefox were 25 per cent faster. Task Manager showed that system activity had fallen by 30 per cent. We had 300MB more RAM available, and our applications had been tuned to require less than they previously did.
Our work had got us close to the goal of brand-new PC performance. Now it was time to take the next step and make our system go faster than it had ever gone before.
