Too much Windows Vista cache, a bad ting? Well, apparently yes, through Excessive Cached Write I/O and Excessive Cached Read I/O. As you probably know by now, cache is connected with boosting the performance of data accessing processes that target sluggish storage media. In an ideal scenario, the data or the code pages would be completely located within the system memory. The speed at which data is accessed, in the physical RAM, exceeds by far that of similar processes that involve a hard disk, by approximately 1 million times. But, because of the usually limited amount of RAM, the operating system will have to deal with system cache. (more…)

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We’ve filtered and sorted through the hundreds of Vista hints and tweaks to find the ones that we think the most readers will find useful. While Vista still feels new, these hints and tweaks might help you settle into your OS.

Introduction
So you’ve installed Vista, perhaps against your better judgment, and now you’re wondering what you can do to spruce it up a bit. We’re right there with you, and have poured over the Web looking for the coolest, most-useful tweaks we could find. We searched high and low, and completed this list of tweaks so that you did not have to. We have personally tested all of these tweaks and employ most of them on our own systems. (more…)

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Windows XP contains several tweakable memory settings in the registry, one of which is the DisablePagingExecutive registry key. This controls whether the operating system will transfer its essential driver and kernel files to the ‘virtual memory’ (the page file on the hard disk). It defaults to allowing this.

Obviously, transferring portions of the system to hard drive memory can considerably slow things down, and it appears that Windows XP does this periodically, whether or not the system is actually low on physical memory (RAM).

If you have 256MB of system memory or more, try this registry tweak to force Windows to keep its operating data in main memory: (more…)

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Few days back, I bought Windows Vista Business Upgrade the other day so I could start playing with it. Since I did not want to mess up the configuration of my current computer, I thought I would install Vista on a blank hard drive.

Sounds easy enough, after all the previous versions of Windows required you to have a legitimate copy of an older Windows operating system and simply asked for that copy during the install so they could verify upgrade compliance.

Before installing Windows Vista, I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on my current system. As I suspected, my video card was not up to Vista standards and the 512MB of RAM was on the low end of what Vista wanted. (more…)

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Although it is virtually handicapped in terms of the options it actually provides to the user in comparison to Windows XP, the hard disk defragmentation utility in Windows Vista is an evolution of the equivalent from the predecessor operating system. But the enhancements come essentially under the hood of the tool. In this context, the actual defragmentation engine was tuned up, as well as the management of the fragmentation process.

“By default, the defrag tool only defragments files smaller than 64 megabytes (MB). Therefore, files larger than 64 MB are not moved unnecessarily. In earlier versions of Windows operating systems, if the defrag engine was in the middle of a large move request, it could take lots of time to cancel defragmentation. In Windows Vista, the defrag engine processes input and output requests in smaller portions. Therefore, you can avoid situations where the defrag engine is busy with processing large move requests when you cancel a defragmentation session”, Microsoft explained. (more…)

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That’s right! Windows Vista can run using a total of zero system memory. Well, bear with me, it will all make sense in the end. When it first introduced Windows Vista, Microsoft faced criticism because of the system requirements associated with the new platform. And the truth of the matter is that Vista is nothing short of a resource hog. The latest operating system from the Redmond company will eat right through CPU cycles, and will swallow every last bit of Random Access Memory you can throw at it. Vista will hesitate little to consume all the resources at its disposal in order to deliver the high-end performance level and user experience synonymous with the Wow.

The system requirements for Vista are divided according to SKU. There are the recommended minimum hardware requirements valid for Windows Vista Home Basic and Starter editions, and then the standard is raised when it comes to the Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate SKUs. According to Microsoft, Vista can go as low as an 800-MHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor and 512 MB of RAM. But this does not mean that users cannot feed some 3.5 GB of RAM into 32-bit editions of Vista and up to 128 GB in the 64-bit versions. (more…)

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