How to Optimize Windows 7

[TheGreatSatan]

1

Right click the recycle bin and choose properties. Change the amount of space dedicated
to trash only. Multiple gigs of just trash seems awfully wasteful to me, so I keep it at
50MB for each drive.

THEN

At the bottom uncheck "Display Delete Confirmation Dialog"

No more "Are you sure your want to delete?" messages will bug you.

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/recycle.jpg

2

Delete all icons you never use. Quicktime and Adobe always give you an icon you may never
directly click on. Remember, if the icon has a little arrow next to it that means it's a shortcut
and CAN be deleted. You don't have to delete it, but you can.

3

Control Panel – Programs – Turn Windows Features on or off. Then uncheck:

Tablet PC Components
Remote Differential Compression
Click the plus sign next to Games to expand it. Disable things you will never use anyway.
I will never want to play Solitaire or Hearts or any other card game, so I uncheck them all.
Under the Print and document services, you can disable items that you may also never
use. My Netbook will never have a printer connected to it, so I don’t need any of
these services.

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/features.jpg

When you are done select OK

Restart later

4

Right click the desktop and choose Personalize
At the bottom click “Window Color” – at the bottom, again, choose Advanced Appearance
settings

Select the drop down arrow next to item and select “Border Padding”. Change this number
from 4 to Zero

Next, change Icon spacing to 36 in the Vertical and Horizontal option. This will cut the space
between icons and give you a little more desktop space to work with.

Lastly, select Icon and click the Bold button.

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/color.jpg

Click OK to apply and close this box.

5

Start button - Run - type "msconfig" without quotes - select the Startup tab - Uncheck all
unneeded items - Click Apply

THEN

Under the Services tab, at the bottom check “Hide all Microsoft Services”. Now select
everything that doesn’t need to be running at startup such as QuickTime, Office and
Windows Media Player.

THEN

Click the Boot tab – Change the Timeout from 30 seconds to 3 seconds. You can even
disable the GUI (Graphic User Interface) from here. That would get rid of the scroll bar
at startup or the animation that show W7 is loading. I didn't notice a speed improvement
here, just a longer black screen before the desktop. I imagine if you have very little RAM
this would help you.

THEN

Select Advanced Options - Put a check in the box 'Number of Processors' - Select the pull
down menu and choose the number of cores onboard (2 for dual core, 4 for Quad core)

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/procs.jpg

Hit OK twice and restart later.

6

Right Click the Start Button

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/start.jpg

Select properties - Under Privacy, uncheck both boxes - click OK

7

Right Click 'Computer' - choose Properties - On left side choose Advanced System Settings
The Advanced Tab will be displayed, under Performance choose Settings - Under the Visual
Effects Tab choose 'Best Performance' – Then select the following:

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/visual_effects.jpg

This will keep those things that make Windows 7 pretty, but still squeeze a few milliseconds
out of it. You can also check Transparent glass, but it annoys me in some instances.

Click Apply.

THEN

Click the Advanced Tab - Under Virtual Memory click 'Change' - Uncheck 'Automatically
manage....' - Click Custom Size - In the Initial Size block enter the amount of RAM actually
present (2GB = 2048) - In the Maximum Size block enter double of the first amount
(4GB = 4096) - Click 'Set', then OK

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/virtual.jpg

Restart later

8

Click on the Windows Start button and type "regedit" without the quotes into the 'Search
programs and files' box. Click on the expandable arrow next to HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
Expand the Control Panel folder, and then click directly on the Desktop folder. In
the right pane, look for and double click MenuShowDelay. Change the value from
whatever it is to 100. This figure represents the milliseconds of delay between your
click and a menu's display.

Close the screen.

9

Click the start menu, then click on your name to open your personal folder.
On the left side choose Libraries. Open the Pictures, Music, and Videos separately
and delete all the samples.

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/libraries.jpg

10

Go to Computer, and right click your hard drive. Select Properties. Uncheck both boxes
at the bottom for indexing and hard drive compression. When asked, apply settings to
the drive only and NOT files and folders.

http://www.pcmodhouse.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/compress.jpg

Now you can Restart

[x88x]

Nice, I actually didn't know about some of these.

One thing I would add; if you have 8GB+ of RAM, disabling Virtual memory will give you a slight boost. You almost never would have hit it, and this saves Windows having to manage it.

[SXRguyinMA]

nice thanks! +rep

[diluzio91]

that helped the speed noticeably on my pc! +rep

[xr4man]

one question. how do you stop certain programs from asking if you really want to do what ever you just clicked? for example, i still want to have win 7 give me the "do you want this to happen" dialog box, but i want to disable it for certain programs that i click often, such as cpu-z. how do i tell it to use the same response always?

[Fuganater]

Great write up. I will do some of these to my new build and laptop.


one question. how do you stop certain programs from asking if you really want to do what ever you just clicked? for example, i still want to have win 7 give me the "do you want this to happen" dialog box, but i want to disable it for certain programs that i click often, such as cpu-z. how do i tell it to use the same response always?

Enable your built in Administrator Account. When I install Vista/7, I make my user name like "temp" or something random. Then I enable the Admin account, rename it to my name, and delete the "temp" account. This solves alot of problems including the "Do you really want this to happen" dialog.

[xr4man]

hmm, i don't really want to do that though. it's for my mother's computer and i'd rather not give her total uninhibited admin rights.

basically, i just want to tell it not to ask when she starts up word perfect.

[Fuganater]

I know in Vista you can disable UAC... not 100% sure but try looking for that in the control pannel.

[xr4man]

okie dokie.

[x88x]

Windows 7 added several levels of UAC interaction (accessible through the user account profile settings), but unfortunately I don't think there's an option to 'always allow [x] program'.

[mDust]

I forget if it's the shortcut or the actual .exe, but you can right click>properties>check 'run as admin'. Just do that for each frequently used program and you're set. Or you can disable UAC completely, but it sounds like you don't want to do that.

[xr4man]

i know win xp had a little check box that said "do this everytime". i haven't seen that with win 7 though.

[x88x]

Well, yes and no. XP has that checkbox for some things, but XP does not have UAC.

[Twigsoffury]

Nice, I actually didn't know about some of these.

One thing I would add; if you have 8GB+ of RAM, disabling Virtual memory will give you a slight boost. You almost never would have hit it, and this saves Windows having to manage it.

Some games specifically use the page file and can introduce crashes into the game with the page file disabled.

Battleground Europe being one of them. : P



You can also free up 10's and 10's of GB (50GB on a 1TB drive) by lowering the amount of space allocated for system restore.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

[Konrad]

Disabling the search index doesn't just free up the 10-20% of your HDD space it normally eats ... it'll stop the drives from constantly spinning. Less heat in your box, less battery drain in your lap, good either way.