Improve Vista’s Performace with RTI…
David
There’s an acronym from the past for you. Run Time Improvements (RTI). I am always looking for ways to squeeze another speed improvement out of Windows Vista. In fact, a few weeks ago I made some changes to my Dell Latitude D820 and it made a very real difference in how the machine performed.
Before I list out all of the stuff below, keep in mind I am willing to sacrifice some features for the sake of overall system performance. I’m usually looking for all of the horsepower out of my machine for a couple of reasons. Video encoding or virtualization workloads.
I don’t need eye candy for those two purposes. I don’t need a search index. I don’t need the system to anticipate what the next ten programs I am going to launch are going to be.
If I dial back some of these features in Windows Vista, am I losing some key features? Absolutely, positively yes. However, information is power so get ready because I’m going to arm you with some of my tricks and you can decide what you like and dislike. One thing before we move on… I don’t recommend turning off security features but I do make one exception to this rule. More on that later.
Fast And Easy
I like to keep things simple so we’ll start with the easiest first. Remember the dialog box just below? I know you’ve probably stumbled across it. It’s in nearly all of the operating systems we’ve produced yet most people don’t make any changes to it.
I do. These settings alone can have a rather profound change to the way application windows and dialog boxes display, move, minimize or disappear. Eye candy takes horsepower and don’t underestimate the visual impact. Before we get to the disable list, lets talk briefly about two of them.
Animation and fading take cycles from the CPU and GPU. When you have a weak CPU or GPU, the animation and fading effects end up looking like they are slow motion. I’m exaggerating a bit, but your eyes are actually very good at picking up motion changes. I have several machines ranging in age from less than a year old to more than five years old. And the speed of the CPU and GPU in those machines varies greatly. Therefore the new fast quad core machine can drive these effects the way they were designed to be seen. But even the quad machine will show a noticeable improvement.
The Performance Options Hit List – turn these off
- Animate controls and elements inside windows
- Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
- Fade or slide menus into view
- Fade or slide ToolTips into view
- Fade out menu items after clicking
- Show shadows under menus
- Show shadows under mouse pointer
- Slide open combo boxes
- Slide taskbar buttons
- Smooth-scroll list boxes
Now you might be wondering how to get to these options since I neglected to tell you. You can get to them in a similar manner across most of our operating systems and as usual, there’s more than one way.
- Click the Start button or in the case of Windows Vista, click the Vista Pearl.
- Right mouse click Computer.
- Click the Properties menu item. This effectively takes you to Control Panel | System in Windows Vista.
- Click the Advanced system settings Task item in the top left portion of the window. This requires administrator privilege so you’ll need to respond to the Windows Vista UAC prompt.
- In the Performance section, click the Settings button.
Now that you have made these changes, you should see the difference in how the applications behave. This made a dramatic difference on my two slowest machines. It was very helpful in particular on on my Dell Latitude D820. Now that we’ve made some changes to the user interface responsiveness, lets look at disabling some optional features and services in Windows Vista.
Keith Combs’ Blahg : My Favorite Windows Vista Runtime Improvements (RTI)
Posted on: Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 3:41 pm 
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