How I tweaked my Vista virtually dead (also for W7)

[PeterSt]

Hi all,

Edit : All of the below works for W7 just the same and you can safely perform the .bat file which is in this post from this topic : http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=548.msg4331#msg4331 (courtesy of andy74 -> thanks !). You may get a message that a service can't be stopped because it is not running, which is no problem.
Also notice that the shutting off the log files (which remains as a manual task as denoted by the output of the .bat file) is not needed again after an upgrade from Vista because those settings are retained during the upgrade.

Edit2 : This all does NOT apply for W7 SP1 (Release Candidate); it is just not necessary;
W7 SP1 shows a few I/Os only (per 1 - 2 minutes), and although the appliances in this topic were not tried for that, it is assumed they won't go away from it. At this moment (Jan 2011) no other attempts to remove those few I/O's were made either.

First of all, for your possible interest, I will give you a little background on what I (at last) did;

For 19 months now, my audio PC lays on the floor kind of in the middle of the room, and while it should have been stored in the basement, it lays there with the disk light shining in my eyes all so often. I thought "one day I will manage" and the PC stays there as long as I did not. You could say it took 19 months.
Well, because I am always looking at that light, I kind of learned what happened when, what shouldn't and what should, and a small month ago I sat down for it, and after some first rough attempts after installing SP1 which didn't help a thing, and some other attempts that caused my system not to boot anymore, I re-installed SP0 and took a kind of other approach ...

First there is a side note, which may be important to you :

After a few months after having Vista (beginning 2007) I got my machine in the "mode" that caused all folder/file renames, deletes, moves etc. to take 30 seconds. Since half of the world is bugged by this, some of you may have this "feature" too. It is about the popup that shows you the calculation on how long the operation concerned will take, and it just *always* sits there for 30 seconds.
Millions of posts float over the Internet about this, and really nobody can solve it once it's there, and btw, 99.99% of people think this is about the slow operation itself. It is not, and it is only that popup staying there for ages, the Rename etc. actually performed immediately. However, it prevents you from a next operation most of the time, so it is really really annoying.
50% of people could get rid of it by installing SP1, which didn't help with me.
Because I tweaked things to the wrong as described briefly above, I had to reinstall Vista, and I reinstalled SP0. I did that because SP1 felt worse for some things. I just didn't like it much.

The re-install brought back the normal fast Renames and all, but strangely enough I didn't find the same Vista/SP0 as the one that appeared on my machine beginning of 2007. It was faster, the looks were different (like aero now being active without me telling it), it felt all very different, and more importantly, it sounded *completely* different (better !). And I installed exactly the same on the exact same machine. One diference : Before I installed it as a Dual Boot next to an existing XP, and this time I installed it as a Dual Boot next to the old Vista which didn't want to boot anymore. Does that cause it ? maybe.
Btw, since then I am looking veery closely at the fast Renames, and whatever I change for installing software etc. I look if the Renames still work fast. If not, I will know what caused it.

Why is the above important for this topic ? I don't know. But it could be, because I'm fairly sure if I had applied this to my old Vista install, it hadn't be enough. So the base is more right now. More lean.

The other approach

What I had been trying here and there throughout the 19 months, was something everybody does : shutting down services and see whether that helps somewhere. It lead to nothing, because in fact you are doing this in the blind. Afterwards I can guarantee this, because so many many things are needed, and all togther they create disk I/O in amounts that one really doesn't know where to start.

What I did is taking the Source Control program which can be started from within TaskManager, look at the Disk I/O screen and the programs causing the Disk I/O in the lower part of the screen, and piece by piece investigate what these programs are and how the IO they generate can be eliminated. This all together took me one day, and I can tell you, this is not about shutting down services as such ! You will see this in the outlays mote below.

What is left for I/O can be seen below;
The first screenshot is the one to achieve : nothing. But careful : this should be nothing during the time *you* don't incur for anything (like in playing a 60 minute track it should stay empty in there for 60 minutes). Did I achieve that ? nope. I can't get further than the second screenshot below, which is always about those things, and they occur at (as it seems) random intervals. The longest that it was completely quiet I think was 14 minutes, but it also can be 1 (rare) or 5 (often) or 8 (often) or 14 (often). However, these are very tiny I/Os I can't even see on the disk light. Compared to the zillions we are used too ... Walhalla.

Btw, the main reason I gave up on this one day of finding out how to stop those last few, is that they are *all* related to or anti-virus programs (which I don't have), or viruses themselves (which I think I don't have hehe), and each search for these in Google gives an infinit amount of hits. And then I had better things to do.
But go ahead with it if you like.


The things you see below are not "stupid" copies of advises of anyone else. They were all determined by me, and they *all* contribute to less I/O. Remember, I grabbed one line hence file the I/O takes place on, I looked and measured its reocccurance, and tweaked until it stayed away. Also there's the other group of knowing what will happen because of what (you do yourself).
Oh, it is also nice to know that the way I did this, makes a necessary IO much more lean. Thus, a necessary access to a file (like a WAV) could incur for, say, 20 other activities, while now this is only a few.

and not one single IO was shown during this typing ...

Here goes :

[PeterSt]

This is for 0% related to shutting off Indexing at some higher level. That only works a bit, but sure not for all, and 100% sure not for ever.
So, you MUST shut off indexing per disk you have, and (!!) when the disk gets unmounted, you must do this *explicitly* again.

What you see below looks like the obvious, but there's something you might not know, and it is really necessay to do it right :

The second screen asks you where to apply the shut off of the indexing, and this *must* be applied to all the subfolders and files as well.
Once you receive a disk, or re-mount it, you cannot be sure what the settings are for the subfolders etc., so in order to be sure you *must* switch ON indexing, press apply, let the second screen come up, choose the first option to be fast, and then pull up the screen again for shutting Indexing OFF, Apply, and choose the SECOND option in the second screen.

Only now, the ever and ever scanning of all the files stay away.
And for those reading this who are less familiar with what happens with our music data, and galeries and all ... personally my number of files is MILLIONS (6 draws to Galeries is enough for that).

[PeterSt]

Bootoptimizer may ****
The only thing what is does, is rather constantly "fetching" things you might incur for changes during a next boot (which you almost never do), while it slows down your system for that all the time. And you know what ? after applying all of the other things booting is twice as fast the least.

Apply the change to the Registry as you see below. Thus, enter N for Enable.

[PeterSt]

The poor thing can only guess wrong here, but does it anyway.

Set the value as shown to 0.
Btw, if it is active it will be set to 3. You might have shut this off already by other means.

Look at the bottom for the full key to this entry.

[PeterSt]

Below is a row of Services you really don't need, and which I shut down for a maybe strange reason : Vista will shut them down anyway (at least that can happen) during playback with XXHighEnd. So I thought they can be in the way ...


Set the Start Type (4th column) to the value I show, and where "handmatig" means "manual".

Note : The first one (03), about the Tablet PC should be left as it is when you actually use a tablet PC under Vista.

Careful : You can see for yourself that the others may not be nice for you to shut down. I did it anyway, because (e.g.) I don't print from the audio PC, I don't capture images from a camera, and I sure don't want Defender to scan along. Note with this latter : looking at Defender01 you must know that at each boot that window appears (Edit : don't apply this, better look here : Shutting off Windows Defender). It tells you that the (Defender) Service has stopped, which is really no problem. It may be my fault that I don't know how that get away with this more formally, so that window keeps on appearing.

Edit :
I realized that my way of shutting off Defender isn't a nice one. Better do this :

Find Defender and start it (you can use Windows Help and search for Defender). See the screenshot at the very bottom in this post. Choose the option where the arrow is, then choose "Options", and in there untick *all* the leftmost checkboxes.
IMPORTANT : When you already shut down the Service for Windows Defender, you must restart it manually first (go to Services, find Windows Defender, rightclick - Start). Now Defender can be started to give entry to the options just described.
Leave the service shut off anyway (see more above), or reboot to shut it off when you just had to start it in order to change the Defender settings.

Now the message as shown in Defender01 (below) doesn't show anymore at booting.

Also look at the last one. This says "start delayed", or IOW start when you ask for it. You might need that at times, and in normal situations ot won't run now.

[PeterSt]

SuperFetch : Another stupid so called intelligent thing, that tries to pre-load and prepare for files to load a next time faster. One of the most I/O incurring services.

ReadyBoost : Honestly I shut this down because many people report problems with this one (and otherwise I forgot). I didn't notice any slowing down of file copying or whatever, after shutting this one down.

A special remark about Windows Search :
This one too can scan your whole disk but for other reasons than "indexing". It is related to being friendly to you;
Look at the Start Button (as you still have it). There's no room to "Run" like with XP, but typing e.g. RegEdit it will show you a link to RegEdit.exe for you to click (and run). Now, *this* will not work anymore !!
You really must shut down this service, but be prepared a bit for this now lacking help feature !

[PeterSt]

I actually didn't know it, but Windows Task Schedular controls a lot of things at preset times, many of which you wouldn't want. Below is one example I also didn't know it was happening : auto-defrag.

The first screen shows you how to get there, and the second screen shows the Status of Defrag which I shut off ("Uitgeschakeld"). Mind you, my 4 TB of disks will take a huge amount of time when they are defragged, and the shown trigger (which I did not create) may nice and easy go off each Wednesday at 1pm, but you can bet that when I want to play music somewhere in the afternoon, the bugger is still running.
Besides that defrag has always looked dangerous to me, and I'd really want it to run that one time I need it (which is completely never because I take care of the music data not being fragmented).


Note : I didn't do much further with the many many tasks which are in there, because most of them wouldn't harm me (they run a short time only, or just are performed once per year , etc.).

[PeterSt]

Here's the most nasty part of it all, creating I/Os which you couldn't imagine.
Note : Do not think you can shut this off by shutting off the Event Log Service, because that requires the Task Scheduler to shut down, and I won't even attempt to try *that*.

So, the first screen shows you where to go to (via rightclick MyComputer and Manage). Note you need to be at the bottom of that screen and the Windows folder shown there ("Backup" is just the first entry of the long list you see in the second screen).
The second screen shows all the logging events to shut down.

Rightclick on each of the "Operational" entries I show, and choose "shut down log" (similar).

Important : All the log files can be shut down, but I only chose the ones which may create just too many IO's. So, you could shut them down all, but a. it really isn't necessary and b. they are there for you to be informative when something is the matter.

[PeterSt]

The below can be reached by Manage like in the before post. I think you can recognize by means of the icons where to go.

With the first one (14c) I could not prove that it really helped, but the intention with this one is to make the system at rest earlier after a boot. My Vista for sure is, but I don't know whether this one cause it.
Please note that this kind of "weak" one, actually had to be a full stop of Event Logging, but I don't think it can be done. This is about the one above this one (look at the right) which is similar but for normal operation. The one here (14c) is only for during startup.

14d u/i 14f speak for themselves.

[PeterSt]

This one may have taken me most of the time to find, and it was the last I/O always being there (once per minute IIRC). This one stops and immediately starts again. I couldn't find where, but setting this interval to 0 does the job.

Look at the bottom for the full key.

[SeVeReD]

Yea yea and yea Peter!
Thanks for this.  anyway ... 1st post in this Epic thread!

[PeterSt]

I forgot to tell :

These reoccuring few I/Os once per X minutes will always keep your systems HDD alive (and if it sleeps it will wake up).
Now, assuming we can't get rid of these, this will be *the* reason to have a SSD (Solid State Disk) in there for the OS. 40GB is more than sufficient.

On a side note :
Since I keep my Galeries on the OS disk (which is the one running always anyway, as explained), it will highly improve "Galery performance" when those Galeries reside on the SDD (much faster access time).

And for those who didn't know : no matter how many disks you have, when using Galeries to access the data (hence find the album to play) all your music disks will keep on sleeping, except, eventually, for the one that holds the physical album you chose to play.
The fact that disks fall alseep (which is an Energy setting) can only be guatanteed for (S)ATA disks with (S)ATA connection. E.g. with USB it is guaranteed that they can't be shut down (at least, not that I know of).

For those who really don't want spinning disks during playback : it is very easy now for me to create functionality that orders for a whole album (better : whole Playlist) to load into memory instead of doing this track per track like it is now. Even better would be to load that onto the SDD (which allows rather infinite Playlists). That way you can switch of all the disks after the smallest allowed time (1 minute ?), and the system just keeps quiet.
Btw, I think that the SDD can be shut down just the same (which would matter for SQ then), but with the big difference that it will "spin up" very fast, so you could set that to 1 minute spindown time as well.

[PeterSt]

For those who already shut down the Service for defender : (as described earlier more above)

When you already shut down the Service for Windows Defender as decribed in the above, you must restart it manually first (go to Services, find Windows Defender, rightclick - Start). Now Defender can be started to give entry to the options described below.
Leave the service to start Manually anyway.


This is a new version of the not so nice solution as described in an earlier post :

Important : Obviously you must be confident in not using Defender, or beause you just are confident without, or because you have other means of spyware (etc.) protection.

Start Windows Defender (you can search in Windows Help (StartButton) for Defender which allows you to start it);
See the first picture below and choose the option where the arrow points at, followed by "Options" as shown in the left.
Now untick all leftmost checkboxes.

Next (which is merely to be sure) shut off the Service for it (set it to Manual). See the second picture below.

[PeterSt]

Below first picture popped up two times over time during XXHighEnd playback. Hmm ... this indicated that it restarted by itself. I mean, I did shut it off (but said "start manually" (should be somewhere in this topic)).

So now I disabled it (2nd picture).
This was 4 days ago, and no anomalies regarding this appeared.


Note that if it is running again on your PC as well, you must explicitly Stop it (see the Stop button). Or reboot.

[SeVeReD]

tada.... guess what I just got done setting up thanks to this thread.  I've got a few more hours of no music as I move and setup the equipment, but the new computer is ready now.