Microsoft offers Vista tuning tips
Microsoft has published a 14-page guide to tuning up Windows Vista on your system. It contains some useful tips, though many of them are general rather than Vista-specific.
The guide starts out with the somewhat convoluted explanation “Although the minimum requirements for the Windows Vista operating system are highlighted in the Windows Vista TechCenter, you should validate hardware performance with your intended applications and user expectations before determining your organization’s standard hardware specifications. “
In other words, Vista probably won’t be much good at the minimum spec. Indeed, the guide then pretty much admits that a 2GHz machine with 2GB of RAM is needed to get decent performance, particularly with anything other than the ‘Windows Basic’ settings.
Some of the tips involve making your computer physically faster, such as using the Windows ReadyBoost system (which involves using a USB memory stick as a makeshift memory upgrade).
However, the guide makes the valid point that how responsive a computer feels is often far more important than the actual stats behind its performance. With this in mind it suggests checking your power settings on laptops, trying Vista with Aero disabled and tweaking the search facility’s indexing set-up.
The guide also tackle slow start-ups, advising users of most of the common tweaks: removing unwanted items from the Start-up list. It also suggests basic maintenance tasks such as clearing out the Recycle Bin, deleting unnecessary temporary files and defragmenting. There are also instructions for using Task Manager and other performance monitoring tools.
Aside from ‘don’t use our beautiful graphic system unless you have a high-spec machine’, the guide doesn’t really offer any advice which deals with the problems Vista-critics have raised. That’s a shame, though to be fair many of the solutions others have offered do involve third-party products.
However, Microsoft’s new guide certainly doesn’t do any harm, and it will at least help distinguish between people who have genuine user problems specific to Vista and those who’d be getting poor performance from any edition of Windows.
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August 3rd, 2008
So what good is this guide?
Im so glad Im not dependent on the MS marketing dept for my living.
August 9th, 2008
A PC should work satisfactorily out of the box for general use as a workstation or in the home. PCs that are used for gaming usually have hardware specs that reflect game players’ particular requirements. Servers *may* require tuning in cases where the workload places heavy or skewed loads on the hardware, for example high I/O in the case of database servers or high CPU utilisation for compute-intensive applications.
My PC has an AMD 2600 CPU and 512MB of RAM, and it runs Fedora 7 quite well without the OS having been tweaked at all – and Fedora 7 was released four months *after* Vista. So much for the hoary old chestnut that states “of course, a more modern operating system uses more resources, and requires a higher spec machine”. Yeah, rigghhhtttt …
The fact that Microsoft have felt compelled to release a 14-page tuning guide is perhaps another measure of their desperation – it seems that that the lipstick won’t stay on the pig. Whatever happened to Windows ‘just working’?