I can optimize WinXP off the top of my head, moving the pagefile, temp folders, browser caches, system shell folders etc to dedicated drives to limit fragmentation and speed up access. Run Perfect disk defraggers, optimize and compact the registry, run clean up utilities, tweakui etc. I knew every service off by heart and which ones I could disable for security and performance gains. Was useful for older machines, which I no longer own.
Really anal things that took up time for minimum gains on modern PC's, since they have huge storage capacity, mem and lightening fast CPU's.
Then I moved to Windows 7 64bit with 4GB ram. And I realised that I might as well just let the thing run on it's own 640GB drive (in the future a SSD drive) as the designers intended, leave the pagefile and other default locations put and let it mess up 640GB as much as it wants with restore, temp files etc. I have a separate hard drive for storage and downloads/torrents (user data) and another for games, emulators and projects, but that's it. Three partitions. Simple.
I'll still watch what I install and remove startup programs and junk that's not required, but I'm not going to constantly tweak the OS as much as XP. I no longer see the point as long as it works as I want.
So I can be surfing the net on C:, downloading/uploading on D:, gaming or encoding/archiving on E: all at the same time and each task has it's own hard drive as not to slow down access.
In other words, I only spend time optimizing what brings real performance gains now in Windows 7. And my computing experience feels no different.
One day I'll clean it up, perhaps a year down the line, or I may just restore the activated clean backup image I made on fresh install using the built in backup utility.
Anyone else given up constantly optimizing and tweaking their OS to epic proportions? (nothing wrong with it, it can be a fun hobby treating Windows like Linux - always tinkering away!)
[Reply]