Comments on: Speedup Windows Vista without Losing Functionality

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:02:32 +0000

I’m glad I could help Olive.

By: Olive White

Olive White — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:32:45 +0000

Really useful informations! I was searching for HDD cache properties and i found your precious page. Thanks

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:52:50 +0000

I have a Dell XP 710 with four SATA hard drives. When I was installing Vista on the new C:\ drive the secondary drive was D:\ from the old OS. On the D:\ I have to files called Window and oldProgram Files. I want to delete them but it won’t let me know matter what I’ve tried. I’m thinking with the Intel Core2 it was using D:\ as a cashe drive but it doesn’t now and I would just like to delete those two files

By: SteveW

SteveW — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:27:38 +0000

Brent, Great Guide! Have you checked out the new larger capacity SSD (solid state drives) that are a way faster than traditional drives. You can even stripe them together similar to a RAID configuration (or maybe it falls under RAID now too). Anyway, might be another tid-bit of complementary info on your site where you recommend spending a little bit of money and going for a raid set up, go all the way and improve response times another 300% to 500% going SSD or more with SSD Raid Config! Thanks for the great info though. I have followed your steps and it has worked great!

- 2.4Ghtz Core 2 Duo, 4 Gig RAM, 1033 FSB (i think), lots of fast storage (10,000 RPM and RAID), and 2 system page files now because of your recommendation! Thanks Again -

Steve

By: Paul Doyle

Paul Doyle — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:18:31 +0000

Quote: “Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or a dual core AMD processor running at 2GHz or higher. Windows Vista was made to run on 2 or more processors. A HT Pentium 4 doesn’t count.”

“A (sic.) HT Pentium 4 doesn’t count.”

Utter nonsense. I’m running Vista Premium SP1 (32 bit x86) on a P4 3.4 GHz Northwood HT (”Hyperthread”) system, 4 GB of PC3200 DDR dual channel, 800MHz FSB, all the Vista eye candy turned on (including Aero/Flip3D), at 1680×1050x32 (22″ HP W2207 LCD flat screen, with DVI-I) and it runs like the proverbial bat out of Hell. By the way, Vista “sees” 3.3 GB of available RAM on this PC, so I’m happy (Task Manager also shows 2 CPU’s, and HT really does smooth things out.)

All my apps “pop” up onto the screen, including Eve Online Quantum Rise and Microsoft WorldWide Telescope 2.2.41.1, which is mind boggling and eye-popping on this system, at 1680×1050 with DirectX 10.1. Incredible, and this app runs very quickly.

This PC also has 2 x 500 GB Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda SATA2 drives, an ATI Radeon 3850HD 512MB AGP 8X card, DirectX 10.1, and a Creative Labs Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeGamer sound card.

Granted, the CPU scores *only* a 4.4 on the Vista WEI, and the memory *only* 4.9, but the rest of the WEI scores – Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Hard Disk – are all 5.9s.

My other computer is a Lenovo T61 Thinkpad with an Intel E7300 2.0 GHz Core2Duo, 2GB DDR2 667 MHz. The Thinkpad is running Vista Ultimate, and my lowly P4 3.4 Northwood-baseed system positively trounces it overall, in usability, functionality, responsiveness, multitasking big apps, and overall “snap”.

P.S. – You should see this “doesn’t count” P4 in action, with the Windows 7 beta Build 7000. Scary fast.

Okay, yes, I realize…64 bit is the norm today, and is “the future”. Too bad the vast majority of users out there with 64 bit PCs and notebooks are running 32 bit versions of XP and Vista.

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:10:16 +0000

Thanks for correcting me Wayne. I corrected it in the guide.

By: wayne

wayne — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:26:02 +0000

you wrote: “A striped volume takes two hard drives that are the exact size and speed (let’s say 100GB) and combines them to make one drive (that’s 100GB).”

Wouldn’t that be:
“A striped volume takes two hard drives that are the exact size and speed (let’s say 100GB) and combines them to make one drive (that’s 200GB).”

When you mirror you use two disks of size A and get a single redundant disk of size A, but when you stripe you use two disks of size A and get a single disk of size 2A.

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:12:02 +0000

It’s a chance you take. The power loss would have to happen at the perfect time for a loss of data.

By: Atof

Atof — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 08:27:31 +0000

“But if you get a power loss there are more chances that you’ll loose cache content before it gets written to the disk.”

There is no loss to the harddrive if there is a power failure i hope?

And many of my frnds have been using raid0, and havent complained anything about data loss, even if there is a power outtage etc… care to comment on whether the data loss is merely a chance, or is it must in case of power loss?

By: Brent Trahan

Brent Trahan — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:36:27 +0000

@ b34r

Sorry about that. It must have been a late night when I wrote that guide. I had it all backwards. I fixed it.

Thanks for pointing that out to me.