Kaiser.. What do you recommend for slow pc performance on Windows Vista

bigguns078 · Jul 10, 2009

Just wanted to see your opinions on improving sluggish pc's on Windows Vista in a business environment.. What do you think of Windows Defender?

mooshue · Jul 10, 2009

im not Kaiser but have it running in a business environment without much issue.
Regardless we would need more info about your system and your network though to even begin to answer that question.

How many users? Do you use managed switches? Is it just 1 or 2 machines or 100? How long have they been loaded? What type of business to get an idea of what programs are installed?

Answers to they best of your ability to any of these would be a good start.

As for windows defender, it is discontinued and going to be called something like Liveone support this year. i didn't care much for it, i have plugins for McAfee enterprise running for spyware, haven't had a problem other than the misc spyware infection in 8 years.

Kaiser · Jul 13, 2009

Make sure you aree completely up to date and running service pack 2.
Turn off that bullshit UAC.
Get a good defragger like PerfectDisk, set your pagefile manual/static and do a pagefile defragmentation.
There are a number of services that can be turned off as well and you can google that. I also like Registry Mechanic, and the newer versions will tune your services automatically.
Download free Autoruns from microsoft and you can disable items that automatically start up. You will need a reboot to make it active.
Right click My Computer and go to propertties. From the left, select Advanced, which is where you will change the page file as well. You will see s number of options that can be turned off in user interface such as "slide menus..." etc, etc.
Regedit to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Set "MenuShowDelay" = 0
Log off and back on for this to be active.

A lot of these are personalized and may not be optimal for your environment. We set them via Group Policy and other ways such as our images.

You may want to make sure you only have one type of virus scanner / malware scanner active. When accessing files, the handle is locked, and handed off to the scanners by the kernel. If you have multiple types, such as a virus scanner and a different branded spyware scanner, you may find a significant delay in your execution block. The sometimes stumble over each other as well and totally lock the file causing OSes to hang.

As for specifics like services and what you do not need running within Autoruns, this is very user/computer/application independent so its hard for me to give you an exact list.

bigguns078 · Jul 14, 2009

Kaiser said:
Make sure you aree completely up to date and running service pack 2.
Yes.. Windows updates are installed every month
Turn off that bullshit UAC.We don't trust the client environment enough to turn this off
Get a good defragger like PerfectDisk, set your pagefile manual/static and do a pagefile defragmentation.
There are a number of services that can be turned off as well and you can google that. I also like Registry Mechanic, and the newer versions will tune your services automatically.
Download free Autoruns from microsoft and you can disable items that automatically start up. You will need a reboot to make it active.
Right click My Computer and go to propertties. From the left, select Advanced, which is where you will change the page file as well. You will see s number of options that can be turned off in user interface such as "slide menus..." etc, etc.
Regedit to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Set "MenuShowDelay" = 0
Log off and back on for this to be active.Thanks for this input.. We turned off the aero interface for better performance..

A lot of these are personalized and may not be optimal for your environment. We set them via Group Policy and other ways such as our images.Yes, Vista Group Policy is managed in our images

You may want to make sure you only have one type of virus scanner / malware scanner active. When accessing files, the handle is locked, and handed off to the scanners by the kernel. If you have multiple types, such as a virus scanner and a different branded spyware scanner, you may find a significant delay in your execution block. The sometimes stumble over each other as well and totally lock the file causing OSes to hang.We just run symantec

As for specifics like services and what you do not need running within Autoruns, this is very user/computer/application independent so its hard for me to give you an exact list.

I was also thinking more along the lines of down the road when the PC starts to bog down from general usage.. I guess the defrager and reg mechanic are good things to utilize at that point.. And disabling auto start up items..

Kaiser · Jul 15, 2009

As for turning off firewall on client boxes to speed them up, do you not trust your internal network? If so there is another alternative that we always do is GP "Access Computer From Network"=Only Domain Admins or some other desktop admin group that has your necessary admins nested. Yes there are other exploitable ports but turning these off on all workstations by default is a good idea and circumvents most exploits. If you are worried about laptops, you can turn off firewall while on your DNS domain only via GP. Just some thoughts.

railslave · Jul 19, 2009

hey, i want computer geek next to my name too....lol seriously A.A computer science. a+ cert, etc etc

check to see if your hard drive is close to being full. if it is, the most likely culprit is that you have auto rstore on, and your computer has restore points going back to when you bought your computer. takes up alot of hard drive space, makes your defrag proccess long etc etc.

Kaiser · Jul 19, 2009

railslave said:
hey, i want computer geek next to my name too....lol seriously A.A computer science. a+ cert, etc etc

check to see if your hard drive is close to being full. if it is, the most likely culprit is that you have auto rstore on, and your computer has restore points going back to when you bought your computer. takes up alot of hard drive space, makes your defrag proccess long etc etc.

He's talking about a full network of machines though.

railslave · Jul 25, 2009

Kaiser said:
He's talking about a full network of machines though.

if he is running vista, each and every machine is factory set to backup and set a restore point every day. if all of them are on 24/7, thats alot of backups that are stored to the hd. id at least look into it, this will slow your pc down a good bit.

Kaiser · Jul 25, 2009

railslave said:
if he is running vista, each and every machine is factory set to backup and set a restore point every day. if all of them are on 24/7, thats alot of backups that are stored to the hd. id at least look into it, this will slow your pc down a good bit.

Systems Restore by default has a quota. Quota, I believe is to stay below 10%. If the drive starts to fill, less restore points will be stored. At 10% for max, as long as NTFS has a breathing room of 30%, you should not notice a slow down.

espskillz · Aug 21, 2009

Kaiser said:
Systems Restore by default has a quota. Quota, I believe is to stay below 10%. If the drive starts to fill, less restore points will be stored. At 10% for max, as long as NTFS has a breathing room of 30%, you should not notice a slow down.

seriously vista just takes a lot of horse power to run. the only fix is to upgrade to 7.

Max2 · Aug 22, 2009

Make sure you have at least 4 mb of RAM memory.

Kaiser · Aug 22, 2009

Max2 said:
Make sure you have at least 4 mb of RAM memory.

LMAO! For DOS?

Pekkerwood · Aug 24, 2009

LOL, 4 meg may not do it today. One of my original computers, a timex Sinclair had 2k and used a tape recorder for storage.

Kaiser · Aug 24, 2009

I started on a Franklin, then a Vic20.

Then moved to all C64s.

hazard · Nov 3, 2009

espskillz said:
seriously vista just takes a lot of horse power to run. the only fix is to upgrade to 7.

Vista's hardware requirements are the same as Windows 7. The rest is marketing so they can sell Windows 7 to Vista users.

VanR__ · Nov 4, 2009

Max2 said:
Make sure you have at least 4 mb of RAM memory.

Kaiser said:

LMAO! For DOS?

Click to expand...

hazard said:
Vista's hardware requirements are the same as Windows 7. The rest is marketing so they can sell Windows 7 to Vista users.

Maybe recommended, but I have 2 guys running 7 RC on netbooks with atom cpus and 1gig or RAM shared with video just fine, whereas Vista was too slow to use.
Vista is Windows ME2 and it'll be forgotten. 7 is going to be the new XP.
Biggest issue I have with 7 is what I have with all new OSes: drivers...

You guys think Vista is a resource hog, install Win Server 08 SBS with full SQL, OM, Exchange, etc... It's slow on 64-bit Xenons with 8 gigs of RAM

Kaiser · Nov 4, 2009

VanR__ said:
You guys think Vista is a resource hog, install Win Server 08 SBS with full SQL, OM, Exchange, etc... It's slow on 64-bit Xenons with 8 gigs of RAM

Ha! That's a given, but who does a full SBS install anyway? I'd never run Exchange and SQL on the same box, ever. I do however LOVE Server 2008. Especially Core Server with Hyper-V over top. Nowadays, we VM just about every application server. The only things we do not are Exchange and SQL for I/O reasons. It's pretty amazing that you can have a VM running and use something like Hobocopy to copy a running VM image and back it up with little to no loss. Availability and recovery are second to none. Create a farm of Vservers, keep them all on the same subnet and you can bring a VM up from disaster in about 2 minutes. If you have it set up correctly, you can have it fail over with zero loss.

hazard · Nov 4, 2009

VanR__ said:
Maybe recommended, but I have 2 guys running 7 RC on netbooks with atom cpus and 1gig or RAM shared with video just fine, whereas Vista was too slow to use.
Vista is Windows ME2 and it'll be forgotten. 7 is going to be the new XP.
Biggest issue I have with 7 is what I have with all new OSes: drivers...

You guys think Vista is a resource hog, install Win Server 08 SBS with full SQL, OM, Exchange, etc... It's slow on 64-bit Xenons with 8 gigs of RAM

Yikes.. My experience with Server 08 Enterprise was that it was fast, but the boxes I was setting up were dedicated clustered sql server machines with 4 quad core procs and 64GB of ram on a SAN. They were pretty damned zippy.

I don't think I'd like to load up all the stuff in SBS on one box. Doesn't the license require that though?

Kaiser · Nov 4, 2009

hazard said:
Yikes.. My experience with Server 08 Enterprise was that it was fast, but the boxes I was setting up were dedicated clustered sql server machines with 4 quad core procs and 64GB of ram on a SAN. They were pretty damned zippy. I don't think I'd like to load up all the stuff in SBS on one box. Doesn't the license require that though?

No, you can Add & Remove all you like as far as SQL, MOSS, Exchange, etc.

Yes, all of my clusters are back up to a SAN too, well of course.

I've had to set up about 90 Emulex EMC HBAs with PowerPath this year alone.

hazard · Nov 4, 2009

Kaiser said:
No, you can Add & Remove all you like as far as SQL, MOSS, Exchange, etc.

Yes, all of my clusters are back up to a SAN too, well of course. I've had to set up about 90 Emulex EMC HBAs with PowerPath this year alone.

Any chance of scripting those setups?