Speed Up Windows 7 – How To Make Windows 7 Faster!

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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 (Extensive Reading Material)

As you can imagine, there are a lot of different guides on this site. I have tried to compile a list of
the most useful guides to speed up Windows 7 here. Please take your time to read through them.
You might want to bookmark it for later, too *hint*.

 Speed Up Windows 7: Change Taskbar Thumbnail Preview Speed

 Speed Up Windows 7 Shutdown Time
 Speed Up Windows 7 using TOP6 Tweaking Tools

Faster Gaming:

 Speed Up Windows 7 for Gaming (using GameBooster)

Faster Applications & File Transfer

  Faster Application Access
 Faster Windows 7 File Transfer
 Faster Windows Explorer: Disable File Access Timestamps

Notebook Users:

 7 Ways To Speed Up Netbooks

 Adjust Windows 7 for best performance (good to make netbooks faster)

Speed Up Windows 7 Boot Up Time

 1. Measure + Speed Up Boot Time

 2. Speed Up Boot Time By Disabling Startup Items
 3. Change Boot Timeout Value
 4. Change Boot Default OS

Don’t Try This To Make Windows 7 Faster:

 Clean your registry

 Disable Superprefetch

Try ReadyBoost:

 1. Speed Up Windows 7 Using ReadyBoost

 2. Check ReadyBoost
 3. 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.

Download Gamebooster

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

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Speed up Windows 7: Change Taskbar Thumbnail Preview Time

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"

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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.
Download Crystal Disk Mark

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!