Speed Up Windows 7 – How To Make Windows 7 Faster!
So, one of the most asked questions I hear is: How do I speed up Windows 7? My Windows 7 is still slow, I need to make it faster!
Introduction: How to speed up Windows 7 then?
Most guides will tell you to turn off all the aero features and use no background wallpaper. That’s not useful, that’s more like a trade-off, because who wouldn’t want a nice desktop? And AeroSnap is really useful! I agree that you can get some more performance by doing this, but it’s not worth it if you are not on a netbook. If you think you don’t need a “fancy” desktop, then feel free to do it anyway and adjust your PC for best performance (link below).
First, let’s think about it .. what is really consuming a lot of CPU and memory? Right! All the services that are running in the background all the time.
Quick Links:
- Adjust Windows 7 for best performance (good to make netbooks faster)
- Speed Up Windows 7 for Gaming using GameBooster
- Speed Up Windows 7 Boot Time
- Speed Up Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Preview
- Speed Up Windows 7 Shutdown Time
- Speed Up Windows 7 using TOP6 Tweaking Tools
- Speed Up Application Access
- Speed Up Windows 7 File Transfer
Things you should *not* do to make Windows 7 faster:
ReadyBoost:
- Speed Up Windows 7 Using ReadyBoost
- Check ReadyBoost
- Speed test your SD Card, CF Card, Flash Drive, HDD
Adjust Windows 7 for best performance (netbooks only)
1. Hit Start
2. Enter “SystemPropertiesPerformance” into the search field, hit enter
3. Select “Adjust for best Performance” or at least uncheck the first two entries
Turn off services and boost your Windows 7 gaming performance!
To turn off all those unnecessary services we use a tool called “GameBooster”, it’s obviously only one of the ways to do it, but it’s a lot faster than doing it manually. You can temporarily stop all services (that are not required) while you play. Best of all, you can even edit the services list with just a couple clicks and add more services to get even more performance.
Boost Windows 7 Gaming Performance with GameBooster
To add any other services, click on “Options”-”Edit Service List”. Now, simply add any services using this format: RemoteRegistry=1
What other services should I add to this list?
Computer Browser (Browser=1)
Protected Storage (ProtectedStorage=1)
Remote Registry (RemoteRegistry=1)
Secondary Logon (seclogon=1)
Security Center (wscsvc=1)
Themes (Themes=1)
Windows Errors Reporting Service (WerSvc=1)
Windows Media Center Service Launcher (ehstart=1)
Windows Search (WSearch=1)
Windows Time (W32Time=1)
- Link: Complete list of Windows 7 services that are safe to disable
- Link: How to disable Windows 7 services
Speed Up Windows 7 Boot
Update 04/21: This tweak does not seem to have great effects on your boot time. Instead use a startup programs manager for Windows 7 and remove as many startup programs as you possibly can.
Do you have a dual-core or quad-core processor? Great, let’s lower the boot time of Windows 7:
1. Click on Start, enter “msconfig” into the search field
2. Open the “boot” tab
3. Click on Advanced
4. Check “Number of proccessors” and select “2″ or “4″ from the dropdown menu. (obviously, you can only select it if you have a dual-core/quad-core).
Speed Up Windows 7 Boot
Speed up Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Preview
1. Click on Start, enter “regedit” into the search field.
2. Goto: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse
Speed Up Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail Preview
3. Double-click on “MouseHoverTime” and change the value to 100 or lower:
Change the mouse hover time to 100 or lower
4. Voilà, your thumbnail previews should appear a lot faster now. For another great tweak to speed up the Windows 7 taskbar, click here.
Speed Up Windows 7 Shutdown Time
1. Open the registry editor (enter regedit into search field)
2. Go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control”
3. Lower the value (12000 is the default value = 12 seconds) to a value of your choice
Speed Up Windows 7 Shutdown
Speed Up Application Access – Increase your productivity
First of all create a folder “QuickStart” somewhere on your PC. Right-click on your taskbar:
Locate the folder “QuickStart” (you just created the folder so yo should know where it is) and then click “Ok”. You are almost done, but we don’t want that ugly text on our taskbar that is using a lot of space, turn it off:
Right-click on the new toolbar and uncheck “Show Text” and “Show Title”! Now drag the toolbar to the left until it’s below the main icons and you will have something like this:
Speed Up Windows 7 Using ReadyBoost
Ok, now all unnecessary services are stopped. What would be the next logical step? When AMD and Microsoft were not able to increase the CPU power significantly any more, they simply added more CPU’s, that’s why we have dual and quad-core CPU’s nowadays. So, what you can do is to get more RAM. However, we don’t want to buy anything new, because we’re on a low budget. Although, I am sure that you own an USB-stick , right?
Since Windows Vista there is a little feature, that most people do NOT use effectively. To be honest with you, I haven’t used it myself and I might run into errors while I try to show it to you. The feature is called ReadyBoost and can give you up to 6% more performance. This depends on the amount of RAM you have. Low-End system with less RAM will see a great performance increase and many applications will load faster. Since Windows 7 there is no longer a memory limit of 4GB and you can use several devices for ReadyBoost.
1. Plugin your USB-stick
2. Move all your files on that stick into a folder on your hard drive to make room.
3. Start the Explorer (Windows + E), do a right-click on your drive and select properties.
4. Open the tab ReadyBoost and pick Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost. Click on Apply.
5. Repeat the steps 1-4 for all other devices (unlimited)
ReadyBoost - increase your performance by 4-6%
Ok, so we added a ReadyBoost device. Let’s see what it looks like:
ReadyBoost Cache (898MB)
On the drive you can find a cache file now that should be pretty big. I still had some other files on the stick, because this is my MP3-player.
Check if ReadyBoost is working
What’s next? Right, did it really improve my performance or is a USB-stick (not even USB2.0) insufficient? First of all, I did a check to see if the ReadyBoost drive is working.
1. Goto “Start” – Enter “Performance” into the search field
2. Click on “Performance Monitor”
3. Add “ReadyBoost Cache”
Add "ReadyBoost Cache"
I started the game “Command&Conquer Red Alert 3″. I thought if my drive is working, I should be able to see something now – and I was right: Click here to open the results in a new windows .
According to Tom Archer, your card is supposed to have the following requirements:
2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes
Tom also put together a great list that will answer any question you might have about ReadyBoost, for example:
Q: Aren’t Hard Disks faster than flash? My HDD has 80MB/sec throughput. A: Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.
Make sure to visit Tom’s Blog if you want to know anything about ReadyBoost.
Speed test your SD Card, CF Card, Flash Drive, HDD
Next, I downloaded a tool called “Crystal Disk Mark”, which is pretty cool to speed test your sd cards, flash drives and any other disk. In the meantime, I added my USB2.0 Card Reader, one 2GB CF Card and one 2GB SD Card (lucky me), because I was pretty sure that my MP3-Player wouldn’t perform very well.
Unfortunately, the results were very close to the requirements, but still below:
Benchmark of my 2GB CF Card
Next, I tested my SD Card. I supposed it would be a lot slower – how wrong I was!
Benchmark of my 2GB SD Card
Last but not least, I tested my 1TB HDD to compare the three drives:
Benchmark of my 1TB HDD (Seagate 31000)
Conclusion? The SD card is performing really well and is my best choice for a ReadyBoost drive. Considering that I only have 2GB of RAM (dual channel), I think that this can increase my browsing speed. I usually have a lot of open tabs in firefox and as you might know firefox is eating a lot of resources, therefore I’m pretty happy about this setup now.
Can ReadyBoost really help me to boost my performance?
Is the performance boost notable? Well, it might be a bit early to comment on that, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is a good choice for low-end systems and systems with less RAM. On systems with more RAM than 1GB it will be only notable if you run some resource-hungry programs or programs that run a lot of small, random I/Os.
Do you want to dig a little more?
Read this article if you want to increase your storage card speed: Optimize Storage Card Speed
Know a tweak that should be on this list?
If you think you know a tweak that is worth mentioning, think about writing an article for us. We will reward you! Please bookmark, retweet and socialize if you think this guide is useful! Thanks!
Do benchmarks regularly!
You found a great tweak, but you don’t know how much it really boosts your performance? Do some benchmarks! I stumbled on a great benchmark software called “Performance Test” by “PassMark”, you can download it here, it fully supports Windows 7. It’s not as fancy as 3DMark, but the Directx10 demo isn’t too bad (I only had 1 fps on my machine).
Post your benchmarks on our forums and share your results with us!
One the next page you will find 5 tweaking tools to speed up Windows 7!
Date posted: October 15, 2009
Pages: 1 2
GREAT Post….I do like most of the options…but sometimes I worry that maybe tweaking too much leads to unstability….. Call me scared.
Anyhow…I am going to try some of the tweaks, especially the boot/processor tuning…will report back.
Pretty nice post. I just came by your blog and wanted to say
that I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts. In any case
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you write again soon!
Great job man! I can honestly say that I love your guide, thanks for all the efforts and time into making it. I’m a bit concern to use the ReadyBoost application as the performance result doesn’t seem that far edged when already having a standard PC (2GB ram, PC4 2.0) but otherwise the guide is amazing. Gamebooster, Crystal Disk Mark is very nifty tools.
thanks man, you ROCK
Excellet! Article I will test with Gamen Booster and ReadyBosst. Thanks for all I’m thinking to make a post on my blog in Spanish and link to this one it’s a good job I will do it next week.
Thanks.
GameBoost is awesome, I’m using it for few weeks now,
It really boost up my PC,
and this article is really nice!
Appreciate your works, keep it up!
My friend did the stress test in Counter Strike Source with and without GameBoost.
With GameBoost he lost 1 FPS
Just keep your PC clean and only have a few programs running, then it’s all good. Stopping services wont really give you any significant performance.
i am surely say that it will not work … and there are many possible threats in this sofware.so users who are thinking to use this my openion is upgrade your pcs by hardware.
i am using window 7 complete edition
it will run faster on 2.8 ghz processor,2 gb of ram,make sure that all optical and hd drives are in sata option,minimum 128mb of grafix card(256 is better).
and if you are a edicted gamer then use it on the above system other wise its not good for low performance pcs.
any other query email me
shumani_undertaker007@yahoo.com
nice posts, very helpful, wanted to find out how i can increace my graphics performance on windows 7, some move are kind of skipping
There’s no neeed to create a new folder for the quick-launch toolbar, it already exists in:
%appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
after right click on Quick Toolbar there is no such options like :
Show Text and Show Title !
Check this:
http://pictures.pk/images/viu1257068031k.jpg
and I cant drag it..there is also no such function !??
Please Help.
Right-click on the taskbar, not the quick-launch toolbar.
You also got to uncheck: “Lock Taskbar” before you can drag it anywhere.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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dude your ideas of tweaking windows 7 is really cool …!!!
Thanks
the advanced boot settings thing is better to be left alone and it shouldnt have any positive effect for dual/quad core
multiple prosessor does not mean dual core dual core is single processor with 2 cores
quad is single processor with 4 cores
the setting is literally meant for multiple processors
Actually, a “single CPU with 2 cores” is literally 2 CPU’s, the effect is the same as if you had the exact same 2 CPU’s, but split. This setting does help, I used to use it in Vista and it works. Dual Core = multiple CPU.
hi, i am having problem with my aero effects on windows7, can i boost my system to display areo effects,, i am using acer 1640z laptop, with 1.7 processor (single) and RAM 1.5 GB.
Why not just use Tune-Up utilities 2010, it does all of this and more.
Excellent post! I’ve implemented a lot of the tweaks and I’ve had better results in terms of speed and functionality.
Good stuff man!
i could not understand most of these tips … i have heard RegInOut is really fine to boost up PC , the software related to registry cleaning …
Oh,thank! This really helps!!!
Pretty nice post. I just came by your blog and wanted to say
that I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts. In any case
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you write again soon!
Hi, i think the other option to speed up windows 7 is by unupdating your windows.. early windows installed are already stable..
hey, im trying to use the QuickStart folder tweak and I cant get it under the main icons, any suggestions. i unlocked the taskbar to move it but it wont go under.
Seth, did you read this tutorial: http://windows7themes.net/how-.....ows-7.html ?
It’s really easy, just drag the dotted bar below your other icons. IMPORTANT: if you don’t increase the size of your taskbar there won’t be any room!! So, move your mouse over the taskbar borders and resize your taskbar to be larger (at least 2 rows). Then it should work.
The amount of Ram is still limited to 3GB on any 32 bit OS. If you have a 64bit version, then yes, you can go ahead and add more Ram, but on a 32 bit operating system anything over 3 gig is not going to make any difference, because it is not addressable and instead of using third party tools to stop the services I’d rather use services.msc.
Cheers.
Wow! This is a very nice post. Keep it up! I’ll be waiting for your next post. Thanks a lot!
thanks for the tips. honest to goodness tricks that really works.
dis article is excellent….
damn gud!!!!
i lov it…..
ty for sharin wid us
I was searching to speed up my Windows 7.This seems useful by comments above, going to try it.
playing win 7 regestry is not good
why:it makes lots problems and makes slower
how to boost right wat: only way is add some RAM & VC(GC)
and installing additonal themes makes computer more slower
Absolute Great Post! This really helped me in speeding Windows 7. Big respect for that! Thanks!
Just wanted to add that the windows shutdown one shouldn’t be on the list in my opinion or should at least have a warning about setting the time out too low.
I have had problems with it myself in the past where the machine decided something vital (could never determine what I assume explorer.exe) hung at startup and becuase the waittokillapptimeout was set too low it killed the process and my machine would restart, it would do that in safe mode too, stuck in a continuous loop.
I have never touched that registry entry again
Thanks for the feedback Dave, much appreciated!
Anyone else got any good tips how to speed up Windows 7?
This is a great post and if your system hangs with the app time out feature all you have to do is open task manager and go to file run and type the name of the closed process I have never personally had any issues with it except for it closing my browser due to a timeout hangs other than that i have been lookinng for some time now what other processes that you can add to game booster safely the only thing i dont like is that you cannot run any internet processes while using it unless you remove the newly added kill process features.
I am using Readyboost on a Windows 7 Pro 64 bit system right now and I can tell you it only supports 4Gb of the 8G Sony Microvault Click (USM8GL/E) and most likely any other Readyboost compatible USB flash drives.
As far as I’ve heard, Microsoft is only CONSIDERING increasing the 4G limitation in the future. However, considering the slim to no performance boost I doubt they will bother.
hey dude, Its really awesome tips that you shared as I was facing the issue with BOOT process….& I tried the way you discuss….It WorkS!!! BINGO……Cheers & please keep Guiding !!! GOD BLESS YOU!!
Also, get Google Chrome, the faster and better browser. It has everything firefox has, and more.
Chrome is faster than Firefox, but if you really want to speed up your website loading, then I’d recommend Opera. Opera is the fastest browser at the moment. IE9 will be coming soon, could possibly be even faster.
If you want to speed up your internet in general you will find some good tutorials on this site, use the search box.