19 Unofficial Ways to Speed Up Windows 7

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Doh! Hoping not to CONFUSE anyone, when I said, "When using Photoshop with a tablet" I was NOT referring to a Tablet PC, so don't try and turn off the Tablet PC service if this your case!!! Otherwise.. you wont be usin' no PEN buddy! I was referring to a Wacom Tablet. 😱
 
[citation][nom]sunflier[/nom]1 unofficial way to speed up Windows Vista - Strap Vista DVD to a bottle rocket.[/citation]

hehehe.. that was funny!! +1
 
[citation][nom]jerreece[/nom]Not even sure why this was news worthy...[/citation]
Because some readers may be the kind who just buy the box off the shelf and dont know an SSD from a hole in the ground. If the article writers cater exclusively to the geek fringe it will just become an intolerable clique.
 
hey Kevin Parrish,

maybe u should consider what everyone is saying and fix your articles to meet the readers levels. i'v used this site for almost 5 years and seen many changes, including the decline in the quality of published articles.

Micr0,
 
hmmmm...atticah has so the most right comment on here...

razer always looks superior to logitech, but the pros end there.... logitech will now get my business
 
[citation][nom]lvlouro[/nom]this is very useful, thanks!!!One question though: What's does PC stand for?[/citation]
IT WAS A JOKE!!!
GEEZZZ
 
[citation][nom]micr0be[/nom]hey Kevin Parrish, maybe u should consider what everyone is saying and fix your articles to meet the readers levels. i'v used this site for almost 5 years and seen many changes, including the decline in the quality of published articles. Micr0,[/citation]Seriously, bro.. there are WAAAAY more people reading these articles than the people who comment on them. 1,000's. Just keep on browsin by if it doesn't suit your needs. Right? Right.
 
[citation][nom]micr0be[/nom]hey Kevin Parrish, maybe u should consider what everyone is saying and fix your articles to meet the readers levels. i'v used this site for almost 5 years and seen many changes, including the decline in the quality of published articles. Micr0,[/citation]This is more of a news bulletin. Tom's Hardware has a lot more about computing on it then just the "News" section.
 
about the 3 Gb limit: this is due to how Windows allocates memory address ranges.

A long time ago, there was Windows NT; at that time, processors could only address 4 Gb of RAM, no more. Since device drivers needed to communicate with the system, it was decreed that the upper RAM segment would be used; even without 4 Gb of RAM, if the CPU saw a high CPU range, it'd send the data to the corresponding device.

Then came later versions of Windows NT, named Windows 2000 and Windows XP. In order to keep working with older drivers, it was decreed that these OSes would also make use of the higher memory address ranges. Then, Intel (and AMD) both created physical address extensions (PAE), that allow a 32-bit CPU to address RAM on 36-bit (16 times 4 Gb); but, since Windows users would never see so much RAM on their systems, well, there was no reason to take the trouble - and thus, even on PAE-capable systems, having 4 Gb installed means up to 750 Mb of RAM hidden away for the video card's framebuffer, drive controllers etc.

Microsoft, unwilling to tackle the driver incompatibility problem, decreed that any system with more than 4 Gb of RAM required a 64-bit Windows version - like XP Pro 64, Vista 64, etc.

During that time, in the Linux world... If your CPU could handle PAE, then all your RAM was available to you even in 32-bit mode, provided your kernel was compiled with the required 64G option (it wasn't default at first, because the PAE paging process reduces performance a bit; you had to configure your kernel differently for less than 1 Gb, between 1 and 4 Gb, more than 4 Gb up to 64 Gb).

About 7: one way to improve its performance is to disable as many background services as you can. But then, that's valid for any OS...
 
count me in... pointless article on site aimed at people who are FAR beyond these simple things. TOMS needs a revamp, I'm still a daily and loyal reader, but damn.... I could redesign and structure this baby 100x better.
 
[citation][nom]mlopinto2k1[/nom]Seriously, bro.. there are WAAAAY more people reading these articles than the people who comment on them. 1,000's. Just keep on browsin by if it doesn't suit your needs. Right? Right.[/citation]

buddy i'm not trying to offend anyone, all i'm saying is that Kevin has written much better material then this, he himself sounds reluctant in publishing this, compared to his usual material. example:"The list also provides other obvious ways to speed up the OS" and "...no-brainer stuff there."

sounds like its part of a "KIDS" section, not even "news bulletin" worthy.

{Anyway no one even cares about comment posts anymore, except Jane. lol} 😛

Micr0,
 
Thanks for the easy read. Made me feel like I knew all there is to know about Windows. Please don't waste my time. Thought you gleaned over things and brought new information that makes a difference. Should be listed under Noob Articles.
 
"The list also says that you should change Windows 7 visual effects, perhaps even disable all the effects to get the maximum boost."

WTF?! Then might as well switch back to XP! One of the reasons to 'upgrade' to Win7 is the eye candy...if you turn that off then what's the point?
 
No duh, Ryushin. (I agree)

Thing is, the eye candy on Windows7 is just fine on modern computers, including basic video (intel) is fine. I still run Windows7 on my notebook and it runs great with everything on and 1GB of RAM. On one of my clients, I installed Windows7 and I forgot to check is memory - he only had 1GB (AMD X3), but it runs so much better than his vista Core i7 computer.

Since MS has canceled the family pack, I went and removed Win7rc of 2 of my PCs and gone back to XP. I don't have $300 for Windows7 + software upgrades for some of my tools that work just fine with WindowsXP. 🙁

But, my desktop (Core2Quad) booted up a lot faster and did some things better with Win7rc over WinXP (There were still some kinks in RC I don't see in Win7 release).

Windows7 doesn't need much tweaking to get a bit more out of it. An SSD would be nicer for notebooks. And of course using a 30~60GB SSD used as a boot drive works well.
 
Thanks to everyone for the response. I'm really loving the nomination, and I understand that this really wasn't a list that gets your hands dirty in Windows 7. But my take is that everyone isn't an expert--every one of us had to start from scratch at one time.

But as you'll notice, this isn't my list--I wrote an article based on the list because I thought it might be helpful to those new to Windows 7 (and general PC optimization). These articles are stored and linked for a very long time, and should be helpful for the "noob" searching for a way to optimize the OS.

Naturally, the last thing I want to do is offend Tom's readers, and I thank everyone again for the comments.

- Captain Obvious
 
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