System Performace Tweaking?

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "After being on a rather slow PC for some time now, I have finally made the jump to a 1GHz+ PC. Being fairly new at having a rather fast PC, I am not very sure where to go for system performance tweaking. A few friends pointed me to Monroe World and TweakXP. Both are pretty good sites, however I find that my system still doesn't perform as well as it should when running a benchmarking test like 3dMark 2003. My score is just under 2000. I know people who have slower systems than mine and get a score around 5000. So I am turning to the Slashdot community to ask: Where do you go to find out the latest and greatest hardware and system tweaks? Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?"

Tweaking tip

[PD]

I buy a faster computer when I need more speed. Tweaking won't be nearly as effective as doubling your processor speed.

Up to a point you are right.

[Glonoinha]

I have two machines under this monitor / keyboard / mouse connected via a KVM. Both are Dell low end servers,

1. Dell PowerEdge 500sc 1.2GHz Celeron with 1G of PC133 ECC/Reg SDRAM and two WD800BB (Western Digital 80G drive),

2. Dell PowerEdge 600sc 2.4GHz P4 with 128M of DDR266 ECC/Reg RAM and ST340016a (Seagate 40G drive)

When I uncrated the 'faster' machine and benchmarked it against the 'slower' one, the 600sc was not only not faster in most respects, it was generally much slower. Compile massive volumes of code, move big files around on the hard drive, you know - doing work. Both have server video chipsets in them and are completely unGameWorthy but for doing work ... lets just say I was pretty upset at the performance of the 'faster' machine.

First problem was the hard drive in the new box, I pulled one of the WD80s from the other machine and put it into the 600sc, installed everything onto it and that made a massive difference. Now that machine is much faster right up until I have 128M of stuff happening and while that machine is throttled, swapping in and out to disk the other 'slower' machine blows right past it (performance wise.)

Moral of the story? Doubling the processor speed is a good way to increase performance, but so is adding RAM to a RAM bound machine (ie. going from 64M or 128M to 512M or 1G) or putting in a faster hard drive if the one you have is fairly slow. Ditto video cards if you are looking for graphics performance. There is no substitute for cubic inches.

Other tweaks include :
1. Turn off your virus checker if you are not installing / receiving new files (ie. your system has already been checked.) A virus scanner that checks every file accessed is easily a 30% performance hit.
2. Turn off all the other crap in the tool tray. Weather checkers, ICQ/AIM/whatever, network activity monitor, task manager, whatever.
3. No desktop image. Any image you throw up as wallpaper is converted to a MASSIVE bitmap file and sucked right out of your main memory. Also the video card has to keep redrawing it when you move stuff around.
4. Active desktop - turn it off. I mean ... please.
5. Comet Cursor or whatever - don't install it to begin with.
6. Defrag your hard drive, and buy DiskKeeper 7.0 so you can defrag the NTFS MFT at boot time (back up your system first.) Makes a BIG difference.
7. (Assumes you are on Wintel) : If you are running Win98 or WinME, upgrade to Windows 2000 Pro or XP. XP seems a LOT faster, but YMMV.

Another thing is expectations - you are not going to notice a 6% increase in speed. If you have to benchmark it or get out a stopwatch ... the machines are effectively the same speed. After 100fps, nobody really cares because it isn't going any faster. If your code compiles in 11 minutes vs. 11 minutes 47 seconds - the machines are the same speed. A PII 266 is exactly as fast as a PII 300, and a Celeron 1GHz is exactly as fast as a PIII 1.2GHz and an AMD 3000 is exactly as fast as a P4/3.06GHz with HyperThreading.

Faster means the code that used to compile in 11 minutes compiles in 4 minutes. THAT is faster. Going from 26fps in your favorite game to 103fps at the same settings. THAT is faster. Going from a system that can host 4 players in UT2003 to hosting 12 players in UT2003 - THAT is faster.

If you want to go faster, forget OC'ing the chip or video card by 12% - if you have to benchmark it then it really isn't going any faster. Forget the difference between DDR266 and DDR333 and DDR400 - they are all the same speed for all intents and purposes. You want to go faster, upgrade from 128M of RAM to a full 1G of RAM. Replace the hard drive with a WD200 with 8M of cache. Replace the GF2mx with a GF4Ti4600 or a Radeon 9700 or whatever. Get a P4/3.06GHz machine with all of the above to replace your 1GHz machine.

Honestly if you have less than 256M of RAM, throw in a 256M stick or two. Cost you maybe $50 total, and you will effectively double the performance of your machine. Not only do you not have to swap memory out to disk, but any excess is used as a disk cache by Win2000/XP. As I saw, a 1.2GHz box with 1G RAM can be faster than a 2.4GHz box with 128M.

Re:Up to a point you are right.

[MrResistor]

Note that Win9x/ME is inherently RAM bound. By default it will not use more than 256M, although you can increase that to 512M using msconfig. msconfig is also useful for dealing with all that crap that sets itself up to run at startup, but isn't in your startup folder. It's included in Win98SE by default, but I don't know if it is with the other Win9x's. It's not included with Win2k, but allegedly works if you can get a copy.

RAM

[p7]

Definitely get more RAM, but don't believe it will give you double your current performance. For the most part unless you have a single application that consumes more Memory than your computer has, more RAM will only make task switching faster.

well what have you done?

[donutz]

You don't seem to have mentioned the steps you took to improve your performance.

Have you shut down unnecessary services if you're running Windows XP? Do a google search and you'll find a page telling you which services it's ok to turn off.

What programs are starting up when you boot your computer? Stuff you dont need? Axe it!

Downloaded any "free" programs? Go get adaware and clean up any spyware that might have been installed.

There's plenty more you can do, go google for ideas!

Another "must do" tweak

[Motherfucking Shit]

Here's another "good computing practice" tip that I can add to the list of great suggestions in the parent post: keep your desktop small.

I've found that with nearly any version of Windows, the bulkier your desktop, the slower your performance. I'm not just talking about the icons that appear on your desktop, I'm talking about all of the files contained within your "desktop" directory (e.g. c:\%windir%\desktop, c:\documents and settings\%profile%\desktop, etc).

Keep the contents of your desktop to an absolu

Re:Another "must do" tweak

[PurpleFloyd]

Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on the "My Documents" folder slowing down the desktop. In Windows 9x, it's just not on the desktop, and on 2K/XP, it's just a shortcut that's missing the little arrow.

I could understand things slowing down if Windows has to slog through 20GB of files every time it refreshes the desktop (was this some sort of videoediting terminal) but My Documents is just thrown up on the desktop as part of the rendering process as a shortcut to whatever the registry says it should be. I would imagine that a big background pixmap would slow things down much more, and keeping the number of icons Windows has to render down in the 20-30 range is probably a good idea.

On my current Win2K box (which I am using to type this post) the desktop renders very quickly. I have a simple tiled background, 13 app shortcuts, the standard Windows shortcuts (My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents, et al), a ~2Gb My Documents/My Pictures folder, and an old ATI Rage 128 video card. My HDD is a SCSI Ultra Wide RAID-0 setup across 2 drives. Other than the hard drives, it's a fairly standard desktop system. I have no idea where you are getting your information, but I suspect there's something wrong with your system, or your assumptions are nothing more than superstition (My Documents displays on the desktop, therefore it must be inside the desktop!)

Re:Another "must do" tweak

[Synic]

Agreed. I think the only thing you need to keep "small" is the amount of fonts and the size of your registry!

Re:Another "must do" tweak

[Yuan-Lung]

Well, it's not total bullshit. There is one case where the size of the desktop folder does affect system performance.

When you are running an active shield type anti-virus software, it may be set on default to scan on touch. Guess what folder is touched all over when window renders your desktop?

In this case, either move the big giant files else where or configure the anit-virus software to not do this would both work.

Having said that, I personelly can't stand having large files stuffed in the desktop

Re:Another "must do" tweak

[unitron]

"I perfer to have all my data files...on a seperate partition where all the user data live."

You mean they aren't an integeral part of the operating system? :-)

Re:Another "must do" tweak

[sheddd]

I've got ~100gig's on my desktop (on my WinXP bos); system runs snappy.

Who cares?

[addaon]

Does it feel fast enough for the work you're doing on it? If so, great. If not, address the problems directly, not through synthetic benchmarks. If you're swapping, buy more ram. If your CPU is maxing out, upgrade it. What's the big deal? It's a tool, not a dick measurer.

Re:Who cares?

[stefanlasiewski]

It's a tool, not a dick measurer.

No no, it's a toool measurer...

Re:Who cares?

[isorox]

Yes, but how do ensure you are making the most of what you already have. If your OS has a setting that by default takes up 50MB of ram, and controls bridging your network and firewire card (for example), you might not realise it exists. Turn that off and you've just saved yourself a ram upgrade.

You can buy a faster hard drive, or you can change hdparm. Same result, one costs money, the other costs 5 minutes.

If someone is getting twice the frame rates you are with the same hardware, you should also be able to get those frame rates. Twiddle a setting and you save big bucks on a new video card.

Re:Who cares?

[Glonoinha]

I think what he was saying is : if you have to benchmark it to tell if it is faster, it isn't faster. From a macro view, either it is fast or it isn't fast - and no amount of tweaking is going to change that.

The exceptions of course are :

1. Insuring that the machine is using the fastest connection the hard drive subsystem can handle (ie UDMA-100 is going to be MUCH faster than PIO4)
2. Defragging the FAT/MFT using a boot time defragger.
3. All the other stuff I listed in my other post.

There is no differen

3DMark?

[cybermace5]

If you are concerned about 3DMark...buy a graphics card so expensive that you shed tears when you sign the check (funded by the sale of your firstborn).

Find non-graphics intensive benchmarks, and watch your friends decline to run them like the cowards they are....

What does he consider speed?

[Mattygfunk1]

Well said. Firstly he needs to work out exactly what he is testing with 3DMark and find something that is appropriate for his use of the computer. There will always be tweaks to push that extra bit, but if it is frame rates he is after then there is no escape from a GPU with some grunt.

____________________
cheap web site hosting @ $3 [cheap-web-...ing.com.au]

Re:3DMark?

[Fweeky]

A £50 R9000 is perfectly adequate to get a reasonable 3D Marks score, not to mention play any game you fancy, although perhaps not at 1600*1200 with 8xFSAA, 32x ansio and full detail ;)

Failing that, well, you'll struggle to pay more than £350 for a graphics card, that's almost half the cost of a 3GHz Athlon/P4 ;)

Re:3DMark?

[cybermace5]

Well, with the market the way it is, firstborn are running pretty cheap.

Re:CPU speed

[The Clockwork Troll]

Ironically this was the most concise insightful reply to the article so far.

Resources or Benchmarks?

[Associate]

Are your system resources significantly reduced or are your benchmarks just low?

Wrong benchmark

[topside420]

If you want to test CPU performance, try a differant benchmark program. While your friends may have had a slower CPU, they most likely had a much better video card than you have. I'm sure you could find a rather decent card for cheap if your not *too* concerned with the latest/greatest. I'm chugging along on a GeForce2 TI, and its still serving me very nicely. [I paid quite a bit for it back in the day :\]

If your not concerned with 3D performance, 3DMark isnt a good program to base your judgements.

5000 points

[yarbo]

You're not going to score 5000 points unless you can play all the tests. You'll need directx 9 hardware to run all the tests. A geforce 4 ti 4600 won't cut it.

btw, to increase your score easily, just turn the quality all the way down ;)

more info

[Wuffle]

It would be nice if you would supply your computers specs then we can judge if your 3dmark 2003 score is good enough.

The 3dmark 2003 score is very dependant on your graphics card because it is designed to test DX9 features, not what current games are like. So if you have a geforce 4 and your friends have Radeon 9700's your score will suffer badly in comparison.

What do the games you play run like? As long as they don't have a shitty fps I don't really see the problem - benchmark scores aren' everything as long as the pc does what you want it to.

Ummm

[draziw]

You're on slashdot - so How about installing Linux? It will run faster. :) I'd vote for Redhat or Debian - though I hear good things about Gentoo too.

For Windows - add memory, defrag often, make sure HD write cache is turned on.

For Linux - make sure hdparm has good settings for your drive (eg: DMA, 32bit, etc)

For Both: Make sure Acoustic Management is turned off (for faster drive seeks). Turn off services you don't need. (don't burn memory or CPU time)

Good luck,
Ryan

Hardware tweaking a waste

[0x0d0a]

Mention the OS and the programs you use.

Hardware tweaking is a waste. In almost any real-world situation, maybe you'll get up to 10% more performance.

A software tweak can buy you much, much more. Your system is *definitely* not running twice as slow as your friends because of a lack of "tweaking" the hardware (assuming you aren't doing something bizarre like running the processor at only half the rated frequency or something silly like that).

You'll have to mention the OS and the programs you're using.

Abstract benchmark scores pretty much mean nothing. Say "Apache maxes out at 150 simultaneous connections" or "I only get 20 FPS in foggy parts of Max Payne".

I blame the software.

[termos]

*Start of advice*
I am using another Operating System than Windows.
*End of advice*

Sunshine

[Michael.Forman]

A trick that really improved the performance of my PC was replacing it with a Sun Blade 2000 with dual processors, 8 GB of memory, and a 24.1-inch LCD display.

The unexpected bonus was the tricked out "Sun" headlight in front and color shifting paint.

Re:Sunshine

[nbvb]

That's because you're using CDE or GNOME or some other crap that Sun ships.

I use WindowMaker. 3 of my co-workers use BlackBox, FVWM (one, not two), and CTWM respectively.

Trust me; it makes a difference :)

--DM

Personal Tweeks

[D.A. Zollinger]

Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?

[sarcasm mode on]
Well, it is kind of personal, but I like to take the nipple between my forefinger and thumb, squeeze mildly hard, and rotate just slightly. The tweek isn't too painful, and the nipple hardens up just nicely.
[sarcasm mode off]

OH COME ON! You can't tell me that was the first thing to enter your mind when you saw the word "tweak." If it wasn't, your mind is not far enough in the gutter.

You asked for it

[tres]

My [freebsd.org] favorite [debian.org] perfomrance [mandrake.com] tweaks [openbsd.org].

Try them, you'll be amazed.

Well, what were you expecting...

Windows XP Tweaks

[buro9]

The first one is for registry and group policy changes to remove the bloat and make more things memory resident:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/ winxptweak/1.html [neoseeker.com]

The next is a guide to services, to aid you in knowing which ones that you wish to prevent from running automatically:
http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/service411.htm [blkviper.com]

These do make considerable improvements in desktop applications and general speed of the system, but are unlikely to make any difference to 3D benchmarks.

Re:Windows XP Tweaks

[silvwolf]

I used the info on blkviper for our machines in the computer labs at school. Took out all the unnecessary services and had the Celeron 800's w/ 128MB of RAM to the XP desktop in 28 seconds after the POST. Win98, on those same machines, took 31 seconds according to my Timex.

I could actually tell a difference in web surfing and such on the computers... stripped down XP felt faster than Win98.

Geez!

[Khazunga]

What's all the fuss about benchmarks? It's just like dick length: don't fret over it. If she's all cuddly and smiling in the end, it's big enough.

Start-ups

[Quill_28]

This has probably already been mentioned or too obvious, but worth repeating.

Make sure to stop all programs that you don't need from being started up.
There are programs out there that will tell you what is being started and from where, can't remember any names.

Re:Start-ups

[jafuser]

There's a nice lean little program by Mike Lin called Startup Control Panel. It lets you temporarily remove program execution entries from many of the different windows startup locations, by simply un-checking that item from the list.

I also run another program called StartupMonitor which will pop up a dialog box whenever a program tries to insert one of these startup program execution entries and ask you if you want to give it permission to do so or not.

Graphics card!

[eggstasy]

The poster describes his PC as a "1GHz+" machine.
First of all 1GHz is old news. Modern machines go up to 3GHz. And the speed of your CPU matters little in 3D Mark, compared to the speed of your graphics card. Are you sure you're running the same card as the other folks? A "1GHz+" system with a Geforce2 will always perform much much worse than a "1GHz+" system with a Geforce 4!
A difference of 3000 3D marks definitely sounds like your graphics card sucks and theirs dont: Tweaking, in the past, has gotten me 3 or 5 hundred 3D Marks, but never 3000...
You might want to "tweak" your graphics card then.
Download the latest drivers, since they often give performance bonuses. You can also overclock it: Dont forget that people who get top scores in 3DMark often are nutcases who have their test computers running at twice the original speed, with weird liquid nitrogen cooling schemes...
I used to use Powerstrip for overclocking but now all the drivers come with speed adjustments. And, like the other posters said, check your software first.

the hard way...

[i chose quality]

...,darling, i'll teach you:

1. download the latest drivers for all components (chipset, controllers, graphic, ...) and the latest BIOS for your board
2. backup all important/personal data + new drivers
3. format harddrive (physical)
4. remove all components but psu, mb/cpu, ram, hdd, cd, graphics card
5. repartition hdd with software of choice (1 system partition, 1 app. partition, 1 data partition)
6. option: now's the time to think about multi-boot-systems ;)
7. install new os (if it's windows, remove all bloat)
8. install:
8.1. new BIOS
8.2. chipset drivers and all os-specific tweaks
8.3. graphic drivers
9. add one component after the other and repeat:
hardware installation - drivers installation - reboot(!)
10. install your apps on the app. partition, put your data on the data partition, leave the sys partition as it is!
forget c:\programs!
forget c:\<whatever ms wants you to put your files in>!

nothing beats a fresh system.

have fun!

Some tweaks...

[Hard_Code]

Here are some tweaks I remember doing on my w2k system (search google for actual details).

* Turn off all unnecessary services (I have like, 3 services started automatically, and a few on manual which automatically turn themselves on. Remember, do NOT "disable" RPC services, you will be hella screwed. Also, I found if you turn off "protected storage", then BASIC Auth in IE will take like 5 minutes...go figure)

* I seem to recall doing some registry tweak to turn on DMA for my cd rom

* There are well known disk cache, and nt kernel paging registry tweaks...only really necessary if you are limited on RAM.

* Get a utility with which you can modify your "Startup" items (not in the start menu, but in the registry). Lots of sneaky programs like to hide shit in there and start up every single freaking time (no thank you Quicktime!).

Re:Some tweaks...

[aridhol]

Get a utility with which you can modify your "Startup" items (not in the start menu, but in the registry). Lots of sneaky programs like to hide shit in there and start up every single freaking time (no thank you Quicktime!).

Depending on which version of Windows you're using, you may be able to use "msconfig", which is installed by default (98, ME, and XP).

Hang On a minute.

[His name cannot be s]

There are several things that can vastly affect performance:

Warning: This stuff ain't for the faint of heart, nor the weak of will.

Know your machine.
What processor does it have
What type of RAM (DDR/SDRAM/RAMBUS/etc...)
How FAST is the ram rated for (PC2100,PC3000...)
What type of hard drive do you have? is it UDMA66/100/133?
What type of motherboard do you have? Does it support dual channel ddr (interleaving banks of DDR memory, gives a nifty boost to ram read speeds)
What are the settings in the BIOS set to? Do you know what that stuff means? Do you know how to agressivly set those, but keep some system stability?

In Windows, there are many many many factors which are going to affect the 'speed' of your computer.

Primarily: How much memory did your system have when it was installed. Windows tends to set certain values depending on what your system looked like when it was installed.

Secondly: What software is running. Are you running a virus scanner that checks every file as it's written. Do you think that is helping the speed of the computer? Try to limit the unneccasary software that's running. Open up the task manager. go to the performance tab. Howmany processes and threads are running. Check this versus your 'friends' computers to see how it relates. If your computer is running 450 threads over 41 processes, and his is running 200 threads over 25 processes, which one do you think is running too much crap.

Services: Processes in Windows that run, as parts of the OS, to provide 'services' to the OS. If you are running Windows XP Pro at home, there is a crapload of services running which are providing you with zero value. Find out what each service does, and determine whether it is useful to you.

This stuff is hardly rocket science, and there is no 'magic' button to press to automagically get you the best settings, you are going to have to learn what the PC is doing in order to make it work better.

Tweak? ph34R |\/|Y 'Pu7er!

[Gothmolly]

Please. Script kiddies and Counterstrike cheaters 'tweak'. People with any credibility optimize. Since you have mentioned nothing about what your system DOES, and only a synthetic benchmark, any serious discussion is automatically terminated.

Multiple hard drives

[kiwimate]

1. Get two hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, and all your apps and data on the other hard drive.

Or, if you're really keen...

1. Get three hard drives.
2. Install your system on one hard drive, all your apps and data on the second hard drive, and put your swap file on the third hard drive.

Note the distinction: different hard drives, not different partitions. That way you get the benefits of multiple dedicated heads for each major function. Of course, you could also look at striping -- but remember that different RAID levels give different performance/reliability benefits depending on what sort of traffic you have going across the controllers.

As with anything else, you really need to understand where the bottlenecks are. You can have the latest whippy-skip computer with superfast everything...but it'll still suck if you're pulling scads of data across a network on a slow Token Ring NIC which is beaconing (which is perhaps rather unlikely in your scenario, but I wanted to make my point).

Re:Multiple hard drives

[leighklotz]

Don't forget to put drive1 and drive2 as primary master on different IDE controllers, or use SCSI.

TEXT MODE

[Hubert_Shrump]

run in text mode, use screen to max out your VTs.

if you _HAVE_ to have a GUI, use ratpoison.

use nano-tiny to write your word macros in.

look into embedded systems - there's where the tweaking is going on.

and as a last resort: slow yourself and anyone else looking at the benchmark down. you could try cold, or alcohol, or cold alcohol.

3d Mark

[Stigmata669]

Is VERY dependant on graphics card, and much less so on processor. A friend upgraded from 1.8ghz to 2.4 ghz and saw a only 10% gain in his 3d mark score. The best "hardware tweek" is to go down to frys and drop 70 bucks on a GeForce4 MX if you really want cheap graphics preformance

Eliminate Paging

[automandc]

The number one speed improvement on WinXP I've found is to prohibit paging the kernel to VM. I don't have a specific cite right now, but this is a very common tweak which you should be able to find easily. I think there is even a way to do this through the control panels, but I never managed to make it "stick" after reboot without manually editing the registry.

A great resource is www.winguides.com [winguides.com]. They have a good app [winguides.com] you can demo for free that has lots of Win Registry tweaks it will apply for you. The program also does "live update" from their site, so you get new tweaks people figure out.

I echo many of the other statements below: turn off all non-essential services/programs/tray extensions etc. (unless you like the functionality more than performance).

One of the biggest performance suckers is the "Sytem Restore" crap that takes "snapshots" of the system everytime you change anything. It eats hard drive space too. Unless you are a compulsive fiddler, and don't want to have to reinstall a driver manually, turn that right off.

Finally, in XP, you absolutely must turn off all the crappy eye-candy. Go to "System->Advanced->Performance Settings" and select "Fastest" or whatever. That turns off all the dumb GUI effects. Using the old Windows "theme" also seems to improve GUI performance significantly.

Finally, run AdAware, and keep careful track of what is getting installed on your system. (e.g. turn off Google Computing if you run the toolbar!) In the Windows world, everyone is always trying to put their junk on your box.

Re:Eliminate Paging

[megabyte405]

It's called "DisablePagingExecutive". Search for it in the registry guides at winguides.com. Also, rather than AdAware, you might want to try Spybot Search and Destroy, from security.kolla.de It's much better.

Don't run extra unneeded processes

[yuri benjamin]

Disable any daemons that you don't absolutely need.
This not only speeds up performance as well as shortening boot time, it also enhances security.

I'm not sure where in Windows you switch off extra services (control panel?) but on my box I would run Mandrake Control Centre.

Yuri

Uhh...

[sheldon]

What's a 1Ghz+ PC mean? Quality hardware, or cheap?

3dMark 2003 is almost entirely dependent upon video card speed. I have a 1.2Ghz PIII. When I had a Riva TNT2 in it, I got maybe 1500. A Radeon VE received around 2000. Now I have an GeForce4 and I see something like 4500.

As for Windows XP specifically. I have two tweaks which I have found make a great difference. One involves removing the CTF subsystem, and the other involves installing the recent patch which dealt with slow memory allocation under