32 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| HOLIDAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
X P/V I S T A
cleaning out cached and temp files
improves performance, especially of
your web browser
Unless you have so much junk on your hard drive that you are nearly out of free space, deleting
any number of fi les—whether they’re temp fi les or permanent ones—won’t improve performance
at all. The only exceptions to the rule are for programs or processes that involve every fi le on your
drive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for example, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It makes sense to
clear these fi les out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’t
get a performance boost for your trouble.
D O N’T D O ITX P/V I S T A
turning off
System
Restore
improves
performance
System Restore is a
real aid when it comes
to rolling back bad
Windows patches and driver updates,
but by its very nature, it is said to
impact performance because it’s
always creating restore points, thus
robbing you of a little power. The truth:
System Restore lurks idle most of the
time and rarely does anything at all,
creating checkpoints only during app
installs plus once every 24 hours by
default. Even then it spends only a few
seconds doing so and only during idle
time. It’s virtually unthinkable that
you’d try to run a program at the exact
same time that System Restore began
creating a restore point, and even if
you did, you probably wouldn’t notice.
The proof is in the benchmarks: We
got nearly identical results on PCMark
whether System Restore was on or off.
(Note, however, that System Restore
can consume a fair amount of disk
space—this is confi gurable—so if
gigabytes are precious to you, con-
sider throttling it back.)
D O N’T D O ITdrive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for example, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It makes sense to
clear these fi les out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’twindows tips
The proof is in the benchmarks: We
got nearly identical results on PCMark
whether System Restore was on or off.
(Note, however, that System Restore
can consume a fair amount of disk
space—this is confi gurable—so if
gigabytes are precious to you, con-
sider throttling it back.)
D O N’T D O ITV I S T AReadyBoost will improve
system performance
Yes and no. If you have a reasonably modern system, with even
1<B of R6M or more, you won’t see any performance increase
from ReadyBoost, which lets you use removable Ó ash memory
to cache disk operations. In fact, with lots of R6M, we saw a slight dip in per-
formance when using ReadyBoost. The picture is different if you’re pathetically
R6M-poor: With just 512MB of R6M, app load times and general performance
can be modestly improved with ReadyBoost... but why not spring for some real
DIMMs instead of this half-baked setup4 You shouldn’t be running Vista at all
with so little R6M, nor should you be reading this magazine. 2<B of name-
brand R6M will cost you less than
50 bucks; pricier than a 2<B thumb
drive but oh so worth it.
D O IT If you really want to run
ReadyBoost, the easiest way to
turn it on is to insert your thumb
drive and allow 6utoPlay to run.
Select “Speed up my system” from
the menu. If you have 6utoPlay
disabled, right-click the thumb
drive in the Computer view,
select Properties, and choose the
ReadyBoost tab. Dial ReadyBoost
up to the maximum supported level
of 4<B.X Phack the registry to make your system
shut down more quickly
When’s the last time you didn’t have an application hang on you during shutdown4 XP waits a gruel-
ing 20 seconds by default before trying to kill services that are still running when you’re trying to get
out of the offi ce, but you can knock this down to as low as zero with a fuintet of registry hacks.
D O IT Make the following changes in regedit: Under HKEY_USERS\.DEF6ULT\Control Panel\Desktop, change the values for WaitToKill6ppTimeout and
Hung6ppTimeout to 1000 or 2000 (this is the wait time in milliseconds).
Under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, change the values for WaitToKill6ppTimeout and
Hung6ppTimeout to 1000 or 2000.
Under HKEY_LOC6L_M6CHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control, change the value for WaitToKill6ppTimeout to
1000 or 2000.
Use the same value for all three settings.