You’ve probably heard about this optimization tip a thousand times—disabling the Windows Search index will significantly increase PC performance and reduce hard disk activity. Is this actually true? Or is it not worth giving up this nice Windows 7 feature? How does Windows Search work? Right after you install Windows or turn your PC on [...]
In Part 1 of my SuperFetch Q&A, I began to respond to common complaints about Windows Vista’s and Windows 7′s SuperFetch feature. In Part 2, I’ve compiled yet another round of questions and answers for users who are having severe problems with SuperFetch. Let’s dive right in… Question #5: Does SuperFetch decrease battery life ? [...]
Eighteen months ago, I wrote a blog post in which I debunked the myth that SuperFetch is merely a memory hog and that it should be disabled. I even included some benchmarks that showed the potential performance loss after disabling the feature. The reaction to this blog post was overwhelming! Many of you reported experiencing [...]
Does it take an eternity for your PC to boot up? Have you trolled the web for some tips on improving it? There’s some good advice out there; unfortunately, there’s also some really bad advice as I discussed last week. In this blog post, I’m going to finish off my extensive boot optimization analysis and [...]
Your PC worked perfectly fine the other day, but suddenly, it’s acting up. Performance went down, CPU activity increased, and your laptop’s or desktop’s fan is going wild—there’s clearly some resource hog affecting your system. If our tuning tips didn’t resolve your situation, you might want to look at Windows Task Manager (hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC at [...]
Boot optimization isn’t rocket science, however, there is a lot of false information out there. One reason for this is that many boot optimization tips come from the era of Windows 3.x or Windows 98, and no one really checks their validity anymore. In this blog post, we’re going to look at common Windows boot optimization myths and show you that most don’t effectively decrease boot time and that some are even dangerous.
The TuneUp Blog team previously proved that several common Windows myths, such as disabling the Dr. Watson program and tweaking Windows’ prefetch folder, are, in fact, wrong. In this blog post, we’ll explore yet another fallacy that has been a hot topic of discussion in the Windows community for a long time—a “secret” CPU setting [...]
Let’s start this one off with a little, practical exercise. Are you with us? Good! Right-click on your taskbar, and select “Task Manager”. Now, take a good look at the numbers you see under the “Performance” tab. Let them sink in a bit.
It’s all about the placebo effect in this blog post. Does the hyped “Dr. Watson tweak” (which is supposed to shut down secret, resource-intense background-logging activities) actually improve your system’s performance? Let’s figure out if it’s really a tuning fact or fiction.
Myths about optimizing Windows have been floating around forever. Unfortunately, a couple of technical Windows books, magazines, and Web sites have picked up on them by accident as well. In some cases, these rumors are pretty harmless. For instance, someone at a technical forum started the rumor that SuperFetch, a Vista feature that enables programs and files to load faster, is also available for Windows XP. [...]
