Business Innovation Homepage > Infrastructure Optimization
Tips on finding and weeding out system performance hogs, optimizing memory,
and restraining Vista's features will make your system soar.
InformationWeek
January 7, 2008
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Still, there are a few manual optimizations you can make to change the way Defrag runs, mostly to have it complement your work habits. Your best bet is to set Defrag to run during a stretch of time when the system will be running, but idle for at least part of the time. Defrag is designed to run at low I/O priority and not hog the system, but if you want it as far out of your way as possible without having to manually invoke it, then editing the schedule makes sense.
To do this, just type "Defrag" in the main menu's search box, click on "Disk Defragmenter," and click on "Modify Schedule." My choice has been to set the machine up to start Defrag at noon (i.e., when I take lunch); by default the scheduler waits for a three-minute block of idle time before starting Defrag. After using this setup for about a month, my fragmentation stats remained at around a satisfying 1-2%.
Another thing that has been pointed out is that, by default, Defrag does not touch file fragments larger than 64 Mbytes. This is because the vast majority of the time you get no real performance improvement by consolidating those fragments -- you typically spend more effort shoving those pieces around than you get back in speed. I set up a scheduled task to run Defrag with the -w switch once a month, which cleans up any fragments larger than 64 Mbytes -- but it's set to run at a time when I'm not likely to be around (4:00 A.M.), and running it more than once a month would probably not improve anything.
(Sneaky trick: If you lock the workstation [Winkey-L], Vista interprets that as a sign that you're idling, and will let Defrag or indexing operations run that much faster.)
If you still want to manage defrag a little more closely, there are options. The command-line version of DEFRAG can be run from an administrative CLI to give you fragmentation statistics; run it as defrag with no options to get help. You can also always get a third-party defrag tool for free and use it instead if you want more detailed feedback and control -- I've used JKDefrag, which is very nicely done -- but I've found virtually no discernible difference in performance by doing so.
There are two other things you can do that will strongly affect fragmentation. The first is keeping a generous allotment of free space on a given drive; I personally strive for at least 33% free space whenever possible. The second is upgrading to a bigger hard drive -- say, going from an 80-Gbyte or 160-Gbyte drive to a 320-Gbyte or even a 500-Gbyte drive. This will have far more of an impact on performance as a whole, including fragmentation, than anything you could do in software.
8 Try ReadyBoost, But Don't Throw A Lot Of Money At It
One of Vista's features that may help people with less memory than they'd like is ReadyBoost. Plug in a flash drive that Vista certifies as being fast enough, and Vista can use it as a read cache for small randomly read amounts of data normally stored on disk.
Since flash memory can deal with random small reads far more efficiently than big sequential ones, the idea is to use the flash drive as a cache for those kinds of operations. Everything written to the ReadyBoost cache is also backed by what's already been written to disk, so if you yank out the flash drive, the system won't die on you (at the cost of some performance). If you're curious about the technical details of this feature, the best place to start is Mark Russinovich's TechNet article, where he talks about ReadyBoost in the context of a number of other kernel-level changes to Windows.
The big question: Is ReadyBoost a substitute for adding RAM to a system? In short, no. On systems with 1 Gbyte of RAM or better, you probably won't see a discernible performance kick. Notebooks with slower hard drives seem to get the most benefit from ReadyBoost, since ReadyBoost is most directly useful there in offsetting a bottleneck in the system. Also, the performance will vary between different makes of flash drives; not all flash drives are created equal. (Look for drives that are specifically enhanced to work with ReadyBoost.)
My advice is to try ReadyBoost as a provisional way to accelerate performance, but do not spend too much money on it. If there's $50 to spend on either a flash drive or to put towards a RAM upgrade, spend it on the RAM. You'll see more real improvement across the board.
There's a slew of other, smaller things you can do to boost performance in Vista as well.
I'm talking about updates 938194, 938979, and 941649, which should be installed in that order for the best results. These provide a whole slew of fixes that will also be available with Vista SP1 and do noticeably improve system performance. Don't wait on SP1 to come out to take advantage of them if they aren't already installed. You can find out if you have them already by going to Control Panel -- Programs and Features -- View Installed Updates; each one should be listed as "Update for Microsoft Widows (KBXXXXXX)".
10 Check For Other Driver Updates
Mass-storage controller and chipset drivers can have a major affect on system performance, so it makes sense to have the most recent editions of each. That said, they're not always provided through Windows Update. You may have to go to the manufacturer's website (Silicon Image, in my case) and download them manually.
If you use Windows Defender but don't want it to scan every day, you can always schedule it to run a little less aggressively. The Defender interface lets you run the scan either daily or once a week, but if you want to change it to something else entirely, fire up Task Scheduler, click on View -- Show Hidden Tasks and look for the program's schedule in Task Scheduler Library -- Microsoft -- Windows Defender.
12 Turn Off Some Eye Candy
Those fancy Aero effects are great, but a few of them -- like the flying-windows effects -- can make the system feel sluggish. Go to Control Panel -- System -- Advanced System Settings -- Advanced -- Performance -- Visual Effects, select "Custom," and turn off the effects you find most piggish. The "Fade or slide menus" option is usually the first one I shut off, but I keep the shadow and glass effects on without seeing much, if any, slowdown.
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