Windows 7 Ultimate Tweaking Guide Part 1

I’m a tweak freak!!! I love my car clean, my desk organized, and my computer fast. I have a Lenovo W510 Core i7 1.73GHz, 128SSD, 16GB RAM. Why all that? Simply I don’t have time to waste! I’d rather spend the time eating my corn flakes than waiting for this PC to finish booting!!!

SSD Tweaks

• Disable indexing
  Description: Indexing creates and maintains a database of file attributes. This can lead to multiple small writes when creating/deleting/modifying files. Searching for files will still work.
  Instructions: Start Menu –> Run –> services.msc –> Double-Click “Windows Search” -> Startup type set it to: Disabled –> OK
• Disable defragmentation
  Description: Defragmenting a hard disk's used space is only useful on mechanical disks with multi-millisecond latencies. Free-space defragmentation may be useful to SSDs, but this feature is not available in the default Windows Defragmenter.
  Instructions: Start Menu -> Run –> services.msc –> Double-Click “Disk Defragmenter” -> Startup type set it to: Disabled –> OK
• Enable Disk Write Caching
  Description: Some are saying there is no cache on the SSD, so there are no benefits to write caching. My experience and benchmarking shows there is benefits. You can easily test that using Windows Experience Index.
  Instructions: Start Menu –> Run –> devmgmt.msc -> Disk drives –> Double-Click your disk -> Policies Tab -> Check Enable write caching –> OK
• Disable Superfetch
  Description: SSDs don’t benefit from Superfetch, actually having that enabled may affect the performance.
  Instructions: Start Menu -> Run –> services.msc –> Double-Click “Superfetch” -> Startup type set it to: Disabled –> OK.
• Firefox - Use memory cache instead of disk cache
  Description: If you use Firefox, there's a way to write cached files to RAM instead of the hard disk. This is not only faster, but will significantly reduce writes to the SSD while using the browser. I have discussed FireFox tweaks in a previous post, look for it
  Instructions: Open Firefox -> Type about:config into the address bar -> Enter -> double-click browser.cache.disk.enable to set the value to False -> Right-Click anywhere -> New -> Integer -> Preference Name "disk.cache.memory.capacity" -> value memory size in KB. Enter 32768 for 32MB, 65536 for 64MB, 131072 for 128MB, etc. -> restart Firefox
• Disable the Page File
  Description: Eliminate writing memory to the SSD, free over 2GB of disk space and increase OS and application performance and response time. If you run out of memory, windows will be forced to use paging.
  Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Settings (Performance) -> Advanced Tab -> Change -> Uncheck Automatically manage -> No paging file -> Set -> OK -> Restart your computer.
• Disable System Restore
  Description: Don't write backup copies of files when installing new programs or making system changes. Can free up between a few hundred MB to a couple GB. Warning - Although unlikely, if a driver installation corrupts your system, there won't be an automatic way to recover.
  Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> System Protection Tab -> Configure -> Turn off system protection -> Delete –> OK
• Disable Hibernate
  Description: You may free up to, in my case 16GB cause I have 16GB RAM!!! You will free up as much as your RAM. You will lose the hibernation feature which allows the equivalent of quick boots and shutdowns.
  Instructions: Start Menu -> Type cmd -> Right-Click the cmd Icon -> Run as Administrator -> Type powercfg -h off -> Type exit

Windows 7 Ultimate Tweaking Guide Part 2