Memory Diagnostics: “about:memory”

Does your browser slow to a crawl and bring down your system? Then it’s time to figure out which websites are responsible. To get an overview of Google Chrome’s overall memory usage, type in “about:memory” in the address bar and hit “Enter”. The “Processes” section gives you an exact overview of each tab and plug-in that is running as well as how much memory each needs, as seen below:

If a website is eating several hundred megabytes of RAM, you might want to try the same page in another browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer to see if the problem persists. If any of your plug-ins are causing problems, it might be wise to update them (e.g. update your Flash plugin) or disable unnecessary plug-ins altogether (more on that below).

DNS stats: “about:dns”

Chrome pre-loads the DNS information for your top ten most frequently accessed websites in order to load them just a tad faster. To see which ones are stored in the DNS cache, type in “about:DNS”:

DNS stats: “about:plugins”

Disabling browser-plugins is the most effective way to speed up and troubleshoot your web browser. It may be surprising to realize the amount of plug-ins that are active and slowing down your browser performance and web-loading speeds. To check out all active plug-ins, type in “about:plugins” in the address bar and press “Enter”. You’ll see a window similar to this one:

If you’re running into severe performance or stability problems, it might be wise to disable these plug-ins individually in order to determine the root of the problem. If you’re just looking to speed up your browser a bit, try turning off all those plug-ins that you may not need such as the Remoting Viewer, the Windows Live Photo Gallery plugin, or the iTunes Application Detector.

DNS stats: “about:flags”

Google Chrome is filled with impressive experimental features that will give your web experience a huge boost, such as a built-in print preview tab, GPU acceleration for all websites, a plug-in troubleshooter, or the ability to display tabs on the side instead of on the top of your browser. To play around with these features, (which I must stress are experimental, simply type in “about:flags” into the address bar of your browser and hit “Enter”. You’ll see a list of all features that you can enable one by one:

While it’s fun to play around with these, remember to be careful regarding what you enable. Since these features haven’t been tested 100% yet, you might run into compatibility problems and other issues.

What are your favorite hidden browsing features? Let us know in the comment section below!

The reaction to this blog post was overwhelming! Many of you reported experiencing severe performance problems when running SuperFetch and have questioned its actual benefit, while some have said that they can’t live without it.

In this blog post, I am going to continue the discussion with a deep dive into SuperFetch (and the comments to my original blog post) and help you determine if it is really the root of your PC performance problems.

Question #1: Should SuperFetch be disabled on Solid State Drives (SSDs)?

SuperFetch is designed for traditional mechanical disks. It allows parts of your programs to be loaded from the extremely fast RAM instead of the slower hard disk. Since SSDs are very fast with loading smaller chunks of data, SuperFetch barely makes a difference in terms of performance when running applications. Even Microsoft addressed this issue a couple of years ago.

“If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then SuperFetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost, and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had disabled all of these features  on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance losses on some systems. In getting to the root of what was causing these losses, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With SuperFetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.”

First of all, in many of my tests, SuperFetch and prefetching was still enabled—both on slower and faster SSDs. Next, I wanted to find out if there was any loss in performance once I disabled SuperFetch.

To determine boot time, I used “Windows Performance Toolkit” and let it run a boot trace five times each .

In total, boot time decreased because there was no SuperFetch populating the memory with frequently used data (e.g. your programs). It wasn’t much, but it was definitely noticeable in each of the five runs.

From there, I used AppTimer to determine the exact start-up time of frequently used application iTunes and SuperFetch’s impact on its performance.

In this case, turning SuperFetch off had a negative effect on iTunes’ start-up time, but keep in mind, I was using a pretty slow Samsung SSD from 2008. Next on my list to test was the launching of Outlook 2010.

In stark contrast to iTunes, Outlook 2010 didn’t really slow down much when I turned off SuperFetch—we’re talking just a couple of milliseconds here. As you can see, on a slow SSD, it depends on the type of program you’re using. On a fast SSD, however, turning off SuperFetch either had no effect at all when launching the PC or even resulted in a slight increase in application launch performance. For the latter type of SSDs, I recommend making sure that SuperFetch is turned off. Go to “Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools\Services” to disable it.

If you’re running an older SSD, it might be helpful to run AppTimer and determine the impact on performance yourself.

Question #2: Is SuperFetch the cause of extensive hard disk thrashing?

Many users blame SuperFetch for keeping the hard disk churning nearly 100% of the time, even when idle. They experienced a lot of hard disk thrashing, slowdowns, and freezing—and when they turned SuperFetch off, it immediately helped with these problems. While I don’t doubt that at all, it’s really hard to pinpoint SuperFetch as the single source of these issues. Keep in mind, your average system has about 100 processes running at the same time, dozens of services active in the background, and many scheduled tasks waiting to run.

My suggestion: Use Process Monitor and watch what your system is actually doing during these hard disk operations. If you see thousands of operations caused by “Sysmain” (SuperFetch), then turn it off. If it’s something else and you’re using a traditional hard disk, then make sure that SuperFetch remains on.

Question #3: Can SuperFetch support random PC usage?

SuperFetch tries to predict what you’re going to run next and pre-populates memory with the required information. However, some users’ routines change daily. As our reader, Chrome, noted earlier this year:

“From your description of what it does, it simply will not work for me. I have about 30 applications that I use during the course of a week, none of which are on a schedule. SuperFetch cannot possibly know when I will start up one app or another since that changes all the time! I think that’s why it had trouble staying silent when my PC does go idle. It keeps trying to guess, and in doing so, is producing constant wear on my HDs. For me, this service simply does not work since it cannot predict my usage properly. Even I can’t, how can this service?”

For these specific scenarios, I advise turning SuperFetch off, as you likely won’t benefit from having it enabled. However, keep in mind that all of the programs you do launch regularly may start up more slowly.

Question #4: Does SuperFetch “fetch” large files that you only access once?

Our reader, Dezso Tamasi G, doubted the benefit of SuperFetch:

“I tested it almost 10 times. I attached a 1TB USB HD to the PC. Then I copied 2–10 GB of data on it. (Nothing executable, 500–2000 MB RARs, ISOs) Then I tried to detach the drive. All applications were shut, nothing touched the HD, the message was “can’t remove drive, some program uses it” blabla. And tried, and tried, and tried to remove the HD. In the moment, I disabled the glorious SuperFetch, and then I could remove the drive. Additional info: The Windows Search service was disabled at the beginning of the test. And no virus scanner was enabled on the system. It was definitely the SuperFetch. This doesn’t fit with your description. The 500MB RAR file is neither an executable nor a regularly used file. What does SuperFetch do with this and denies to detach the drive?”

Without having your system at hand to determine the exact cause, I can only guess that SuperFetch isn’t it. SuperFetch is not designed to work that way. According to Mark Russinovich’s book, SuperFetch avoids large files you only access once.

The problem the reader is describing is not uncommon and might not necessarily be SuperFetch’s fault. When you copy files to your hard disk, the progress bar indicates that it’s done, but in many cases, it takes a while until the very last write operation is finished. Depending on the size of the operation, it might need another 20–30 seconds until you can safely remove the drive. Another program might be responsible for the permanent file access. This could be software that scans files for multimedia content. In such cases, I would advise turning off all background applications and re-testing this.

This marks the end of Part 1 of my SuperFetch Q&A! Stay tuned for Part 2 in which I’ll answer more of readers’ questions.

Well, the first impression you get of your new PC might be one that’s been overloaded with pre-installed crapware like trial versions of software, browser toolbars and website shortcuts. These useless additions aren’t just annoying, they can also slow your PC down. We proved that a little more than a year ago with our 200 programs experiment. Now, in this week’s blog post, we’ll help you get rid of all the junk that’s on your new computer and that may have tarnished your first impression of your new system.

Why is there so much junk on my PC?

This is a common question asked by PC users. Third-party vendors like Norton, Microsoft and eBay pay hardware manufacturers to include trial software and the like. It’s actually a good thing, since trial software and ads can help to drastically reduce the price of your machine. However, after a couple of weeks (usually 15–60 days after you purchased the machine), you’ll often be bombarded with pop-ups and balloon tips asking you to activate or buy these products. And while this stuff may help make your PC cheaper, you shouldn’t have to put up with the crapware.

Solve the problem with PC Decrapifier

For many years now, PC Decrapifier’s main goal has been to get rid of the most common pre-installed software products. It’s available for free (for personal use only) from www.pcdecrapifier.com. This tiny tool detects and removes 70 trial versions and other annoying software products that regularly come with PCs.

Here’s how it works—just download PC Decrapifier and launch it. Make sure you click on “Check for updates” to find the latest products. Hit “Next” three times in a row then answer the “Is this a New PC?” question appropriately.

To be on the safe side, hit “Create Restore Point” on the next screen. Although chances are very slim, there might be side effects to uninstalling so many programs all at once. Hit “Next” and wait for the list of crapware to appear. Carefully go through the items and decide which ones you need and which ones you don’t!

Confirm removal of all of the items you don’t need by clicking “OK”.

That’s it! Your PC will be able to breathe again, your desktop will be neat and tidy and performance should be a whole lot better. However, since PC Decrapifier just uses the regular uninstallers for all of these products, you shouldn’t expect everything to be removed completely.

Get rid of unnecessary toolbars

PC Decrapifier detects some browser toolbars, but not all of them. These little helpers can be very annoying—they clutter up the top section of your browser, cause crashes and generally slow things down.

To get rid of these toolbars, open the “Add-on” management tool of your browser. In Internet Explorer 9, for example, you should click on the small tool icon in the upper right-hand corner.

Go to “Manage add-ons”. The next window should show a handful of unnecessary add-ons; turn these off immediately.

Confirm with “Disable”, and repeat this step for all of those annoying toolbars you don’t need. If you’re using Internet Explorer 8 or lower, we recommend you upgrade to Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft’s new browser handles add-ons much better and doesn’t activate each and every one by default. However, if you’re still plagued by annoying add-ons, try this Microsoft solution: “Fix Internet Explorer add-on problems when Internet Explorer hangs or freezes”. It’s Microsoft’s politically correct way of telling you that it’s getting rid of the clutter but doesn’t want to name any names.

Use TuneUp Utilities 2011 to take care of everything else

Having removed so much junk, you now have an immediate need to get rid of temporary files and abandoned registry entries. That’s where our own PC optimization suite TuneUp Utilities comes in. Download and install the 15-day trial version, and go to the “Gain disk space” category to get rid of old backups and unnecessary files.

Move over to the “Optimize system” category and use the “clean registry” feature to get rid of all of the keys and values the other uninstallers couldn’t remove. We also recommend you access the “Remove broken shortcuts” feature and delete those as well.

Done! Now you can enjoy your sparkling new computer without all the crapware and ads cluttering up your daily computing routine.

What did you think of this blog post? Do you have any other tips or tricks to share when it comes to decrapifying your PC?

However, this shortcut only worked on Windows 7. But today, I’ll show you a trick to disable pop-up messages that works in Windows XP, Vista, as well as Windows 7. The best part is, this technique works without having to touch the registry or do any harm to your PC. Here’s how to do it in five easy steps.

1. Download and install TuneUp Utilities. You can download a free 15-day trial version on TuneUp’s website.

2. Launch TuneUp Utilities 2010 and click on “All functions” in the “Customize Windows” category.

3. Click on “Modify Windows settings” and go to the “Task Bar”.

4. Next, click the “Advanced” category tab and uncheck the following options and indicate the balloon tips you want to eliminate.

5. Hit “OK,” then log off and log back on.

That was easy, right? By following those simple steps, you will no longer see those annoying pop-up balloon messages in Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Session: Keeping Windows running efficiently and smoothly

My first session started at 9:45 A.M. and promised to tell us everything about keeping Windows “running efficiently.” And it delivered.

In this session, Brad McCabe, Product Manager for Windows, told us how to solve Windows Vista and Windows 7 problems more easily and efficiently than using the built-in  Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). To prove the point, he used a tool called “Not My Fault”  developed by Mark Russinovich. The tool is designed specifically to produce a blue screen. Do you know how the name “Not My Fault” came to be?  It seems nearly every user who calls tech support after getting the dreaded “blue screen,” shouts out “Well, I didn’t do anything—it’s not my fault!” We obviously don’t recommend using this tool. But professionals interested in using it on a virtual machine can do a Google search for it and find it on the Sysinternals Website.

McCabe then launched “MSDaRT,” part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack. Administrators can troubleshoot their computers using MSDart. In fact, you can burn MSDaRT to a CD and perform troubleshooting on every computer that crashes.

MSDaRT, among other things, performs the following troubleshooting actions:

• Crash Analyzer Wizard: This wizard is able to analyze blue screen dumps and actually gives back readable information on the bluescreen.
• Computer Management: Even if your system no longer starts, you can easily disable drivers and services that might be causing the problem. For example, if you’ve installed a faulty sound card driver that causes a blue screen every time you start the computer, you can use Computer Management to disable it. Try this if “Safe Mode” and “Last Known Good” configuration don’t work.
  

• Explorer: This is a full featured Windows Explorer. In case your computer is totally busted, you can easily move all your files over to an external hard disk.
• Hotfix Uninstall: Imagine you have installed a hotfix that just crashed your PC. With Hotfix Uninstall you can easily, and relatively quickly, get rid of the problem.
• Standalone System Sweeper: If your computer doesn’t boot up due to a virus, a Trojan or other malware, you can use this virus scan – which is similar to Microsoft Security Essentials – to scan and delete.
  

Unfortunately, you can’t just download MDOP and run it (and rightly so). But there are several ways to get MDOP:

• If you have a MSDN or TechNet account, you can receive a trial version of MDOP which includes MSDaRT.
• Via a company volume license program.
• In some countries, including Germany, you can order a CD with a 120-Day-Trial. Unfortunately, this service is not yet available to US customers.

We spoke to McCabe after the session and asked him why MDOP isn’t more widely available, especially since it’s a tool that tech-savvy users would likely benefit from. He told us, it’s not recommended that average users download MSDart, as there are some tools like Locksmith that can reset the Windows admin password.

And Microsoft understandably does not want this floating around the Internet. Also, he thinks that if the company pushed MSDaRT among the public, average users could do more harm to their PCs than actually fix and troubleshoot them. However, if you’ve got an MSDN or a TechNet account or other means to get it, please do so! MDOP is amazing and we would love to see a (perhaps a pared down) version for the public.

The truth: Can an optimization suite solve all Windows issues?

The TuneUp Blog team—with our flagship product, TuneUp Utilities, in mind—made a bold choice and put our very own tool to the test. We wanted to see if and how much our tool could restore the PC’s performance and get rid of the problems crippling this computer.

Readers, please note that while the notebook’s performance improved after many of the benchmark tests, some of the problems could not be resolved by TuneUp Utilities. So, let’s talk about how we tried to improve the computer.

Getting the tuning process started

We used the “Restored PC” (also known as the system after the 200 programs were uninstalled) for more than two weeks. It ran nine hours a day and we used it like we normally would—to edit photos, surf the Web, check our e-mail via Outlook, play games, watch movies, and listen to music. Over the course of these couple of weeks, we repeatedly used TuneUp Utilities and performed the following actions:

• We defragmented our hard disk a couple of times. The “Thorough Defragmentation” option was used in each and every instance.
• We removed 131 invalid short cuts like Start menu and desktop shortcuts, and invalid “Last used” entries that are often found in various programs.
• We corrected about 2200 registry entries. The first time we ran TuneUp Registry Cleaner, it came up with 917 errors. We then rescanned the registry after a couple of restarts and corrected hundreds of additional entries.
• We defragged the registry and were able to reduce it by 12 percent.
• We disabled 14 startup programs.
• We removed almost 12GBytes of unnecessary files.
• We disabled the hibernation feature and gained 2 GBytes of additional hard disk space.
• We disabled the Windows Search feature.
• We enabled Turbo Mode permanently to turn off a couple of unnecessary services, automatic tasks, and background processes.

Below is a screenshot gallery, so that you can see how we cleaned up all of the junk that came with the 200 programs.

Finding out the results

After the two weeks, we figured it was time to go through our series of benchmark tests again; these new results are listed under the “Optimized PC” column. As a quick reminder, “Clean PC” is the fresh install, “Junk PC” is the notebook with the 200 programs installed, and “Restored PC” is the notebook after the 200 programs were removed.

As usual, we made sure that SuperFetch adapted to the programs we used on a regular basis; we also performed each of the tests three times.

Boot-up performance

Due to all of the disabled startup entries and services, Windows 7 launched faster than ever before. It took little more than a minute for Windows to finish booting. While 15 seconds might not seem like much, it is a noticeable jump in performance.

Shutdown performance

Neither the removal of the 200 programs nor the use of TuneUp Utilities made a difference—the notebook still needed 11 seconds to shut down. This came as a bit of a surprise, with Windows 7 shutting down less services and processes after the tuning process.

Virus scan performance

This hard-disk-intensive task of scanning 1.5 GBytes of compressed RAR files took 2 seconds less on the “Optimized PC”. This probably has something to do with the hard disk being defragged and the CPU being not as busy as before.

Application performance

TuneUp Utilities was able to shave two seconds off of the original time it took to start Outlook 2010 Beta—the program never launched faster on this machine! Start-up times for Google Chrome finally went back to normal, however, the slow start-up issue associated with Windows Media Player was not resolved. Like we explained in our last article, this is probably due to a codec that was damaged or altered by the 200 programs we installed and then uninstalled.

Processor, graphics, and memory performance

We were pleasantly surprised with this benchmark. Instead of taking nearly 3 minutes like the “Clean PC”, the “Optimized PC” needed only 2 minutes and 10 seconds to compress the three files. In addition, the frequently occurring hiccups while playing an HD file were gone.

Photo editing performance

Thanks to an optimized Windows, the notebook was able to apply the “Enhance” effect in 21 seconds. Again, due to a combination of all of the tuning techniques, the processor and graphics card were able to process the image just as quickly as before.

Cinebench R10 performance

We were really intrigued by the results of Cinebench, which is designed to test how well the processor and the graphics chip perform. TuneUp Utilities helped increase the performance of the graphics chip and especially the single CPU render test.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat performance

A bit of a mixed bag here—after TuneUp Utilities finished its job, gaming performance increased immensely compared to the “Junk PC” and “Restored PC” benchmarks. But, it did not quite get back to the original levels. (Note: We were able to increase the performance to exactly the original levels when we followed the steps detailed in our gaming blog series.)

PCMark Vantage performance

After conducting the hour-and-a-half-long PCMark benchmark, we noticed that performance was almost back to normal. A level of 2544 points (in comparison with the original 2624 points) is absolutely fantastic, especially considering that we destroyed Windows with the 200 programs.

All in all, the optimization software suite restored the notebook’s performance back to the original levels—and, in some cases, it was even better. In a few cases, however, TuneUp Utilities missed this mark and was not able to speed up the system.

Resolving all of the problems

After we uninstalled the 200 programs, the TuneUp Blog team noticed some major issues with the machine. We were really anxious to see not only how performance improved but also what TuneUp Utilities could do about these issues.

• Strange pauses during file copy – This completely disappeared. We copied a lot of videos and photos from a DSLR camera, camcorder, USB thumb drive, and external hard disk. All of the pauses were gone, as if they had never existed!
• Garbage in “Documents” and “Program Files” – TuneUp Utilities does not offer a feature to get rid of orphaned or empty program and document folders. However, we should also note that cleaning up this mess was done manually in about 5 minutes.

• Remaining Start Menu folders – TuneUp Utilities removed all of the invalid shortcuts within the Start menu folder, but it did not delete the empty folders itself. We needed to do that by hand as well.
• Empty Control Panel – Perfect score! TuneUp Utilities fixed this error: The Windows 7 Control Panel worked as expected, no matter how often we launched it.
• Weird noises during audio playback – Although we are still not entirely sure what caused these weird audio hiccups, we noticed that (thanks to the Windows tuning) these issues were a thing of the past.
• Orphaned Startup Programs – Interestingly, after the optimization process with TuneUp Utilities some of the invalid start-up entries were gone (for example, the InstallShield entry), while others, like the ZoneAlarm client or updater, remained. These invalid entries do not in any shape or form impact the boot-up performance; they are merely part of the junk that was left over by the 200 programs.
  

• Huge Temporary Files – Gone! We were not only able to delete the 3.5 GBytes of temporary data but also a couple of GBytes worth of unnecessary files and folders. As our test bed had only a relatively small, 120-GByte hard disk, we found ourselves very happy with the disk space we were able to recover.
• Start page changed to Yahoo – The start page was still set to Yahoo. But TuneUp Utilities has no way of knowing if we changed this deliberately or if a freeware tool modified the start page. So we just made the change manually.
• A new “Temp” Folder on the hard disk – The folder still exists, despite optimization with TuneUp Utilities However, it is actually good that the optimization suite does not delete folders containing installation files that you might need later. We ended up manually deleting it.
• Spamihilator still active – Not anymore! Spamihilator was disabled by TuneUp Utilities and we couldn’t be happier.

Although some small, residual folders and entries remained, TuneUp Utilities effectively solved the biggest problems and helped clean up the computer. It got the machine’s performance pretty much back to normal.

We’ve been testing this theory and working with this PC since December 2009. During the entire testing period, the TuneUp Blog team could not wait for the day when we finally would be able to just wipe the hard disk and reinstall Windows 7. What we did not expect—the test notebook was finally fun to work with (yet again) after we removed all of the programs and optimized the system. Its performance has been snappy, and we have not encountered a single problem since—and are now using the machine on a daily basis.

Written by Christoph Laumann and Sandro Villinger

Over the last couple of weeks, we have discussed the fact that installing too many programs will destroy the performance of your computer. Check out our two original blog posts and see for yourself:

• In Part 1, we documented and benchmarked what happened to a clean, Windows 7 machine when we loaded it with 200 programs. The performance had decreased significantly in nearly every test we conducted.
• In Part 2, we uninstalled the 200 programs and benchmarked the PC again. We found out that, in some cases, the original performance had been restored, yet noticed a dramatic decrease in speed in other tests.

For the past week, we have used the same PC on a daily basis and encountered a lot of problems that we had not noticed before. Note: We did not change the system configuration or install any additional programs or drivers that might have caused some of these issues to happen.

Issue 1 – Weird pauses during file copy

When copying large video files from an HD camcorder and pictures from a DSLR camera, Windows 7 became basically unusable. The system froze for at least one minute during the copy operation; we could only move around the windows and click on the Start orb. Nothing else would work, such as opening a new tab in our Google Chrome browser.

This did not happen in the original configuration. We even performed a full rollback to the original clean image from December 2009 to confirm that this was the case.

Issue 2 – “Documents” and “Program Files” garbage

Even though we uninstalled all of the 200 programs properly, we found ten folders in our “Documents library” that did not belong there. The situation in the “Program Files” folder was even worse, with 51 folders of previously uninstalled programs still there. While there may be some settings left when you uninstall a program, in most cases, you don’t need these settings and residuals left on your hard disk. (A plea to all developers—give us the choice to fully uninstall programs, including all settings and folders.) Some programs do this, but as you can see, a quarter of all of the software we installed left unnecessary garbage on the hard disk.

Issue 3 – Remaining Start Menu folders

We were shocked when we opened “All Programs” in the Start Menu and found more than 20 leftover folders from the 200 programs; these were either empty or still filled up with orphaned shortcuts.

Issue 4 – Empty Control Panel

What we found was just plain weird: When we opened the Control Panel, the window stayed empty, something that had never happened before, with it only occurring in about one out of every five times we used the Control Panel. This was definitely a result of one of the 200 programs messing things up in the Windows registry.

Issue 5 – Weird noises during audio playback

Every now and then, while listening to music, we noticed that the audio would skip for two seconds. When this happened, we could hear a distorted, very loud, and unpleasant noise. Since we listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks on this specific machine, we can confirm with 100% certainty that this issue was not there before. Even installing the latest Realtek HD Audio driver did not make things better.

Issue 6 – Orphaned startup programs

When we opened “msconfig,” a built-in Windows tool to enable and disable Startup programs, we found several active entries of previously uninstalled programs such as ZoneAlarm, Explorer View, ICQ, and a mysterious “InstallShield” application that tries to start a “Setup.msi,” which didn’t even exist anymore.

Issue 7 – Huge temporary files

By accident, we noticed several very large temporary files (all ranging from a couple of kilobytes to several hundred megabytes) located in the “Windows\Temp” folder. We could not figure out where they came from but suspect a couple of program installers put them there. These files amounted to about 3.5 GByte worth of data.

Issue 8 – Start page changed to Yahoo

Some of the program installers changed Internet Explorer’s start page to Yahoo.com, which was not our original homepage.

Issue 9 – A new “Temp” folder on the hard disk

The program “ABBY FineReader 9.0″ put a folder called “temp” onto our C drive. This contains all of the files necessary to install FineReader. However, even though we removed FineReader 9 completely from our system, this folder still remained on the system drive.

Issue 10 – Spamihiliator still active

It was only after seven days that we discovered we had missed uninstalling one program called “Spamihiliator”. The simple reason is that this program did not put an entry in the “Programs” section of the Control Panel. The only entry with an “S” we found was the screenshot program Snagit.

In only seven days, we noticed all of these quirks and leftovers on the machine. What will we find next week? Next month? Next year? One thing has become clear—not only did the machine’s performance suffer quite a bit, but both the stability and disk space were ruined by the 200 programs. Also, thanks to all of the leftover folders, the machine felt “cluttered.” It was like living in an apartment that no one had cleaned for several weeks! Don’t forget to check back and read our evaluation of how well optimization suites can salvage the performance situation!

Written by Christoph Laumann and Sandro Villinger

Read the next part of our 200 programs experiment – The truth: Can an optimization suite solve all Windows issues?

The experiment also left the TuneUp Blog team and our readers with more questions. Is it possible to get this machine running again by removing all of these unnecessary applications? Can the original performance be restored? Or, will this machine be plagued forever with error messages, crashes, and an underwhelming performance?

See all of these programs and pop-ups? We got rid of the 200 programs we installed in a previous blog post!

Coming to the machine’s rescue

If your machine is in this kind of state, the obvious recommendation would be to wipe the hard disk and reinstall Windows! But, this is not an option for folks who have set up their operating system and programs just the way they like them. Backing up and restoring settings, e-mail accounts, contacts, program configurations, etc. is a tough chore and, often takes more effort than trying to clean up the original Windows installation. So, what happens if we uninstall all of these programs again? Do you think this will make the system usable again?

The uninstallation process

This is basically one of the dullest jobs anyone could possibly think of—we opened up the Control Panel and uninstalled the 200 programs one by one. Since we didn’t want to skew the results, we avoided simultaneous uninstallations, which also could cause conflicts with the system files and the Windows registry.

The entire process took us more than a day to complete. Since the computer was extremely sluggish, a simple program often took up to 10 minutes to be completely removed. In the cases of huge software products, such as the Nero 9 Suite, we waited about 20 minutes.

Benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks

Just as we were on the verge of losing all feeling in our fingers from clicking “Yes” on every “Do you really want to remove the selected application?” dialog box, the job was finally finished. Then, we started on the tests. We performed all of the benchmarks conducted during our last run. As with the previous performance check, we used the computer on a regular basis for a couple of days and carried out each test three times to get rid of all of the discrepancies and variations. To give you an exact comparison, we included the benchmark results of our last run in the following tables below.

As a reference guide, “Clean PC” represents the machine’s original state. Windows 7 had been freshly installed, and only a handful of programs were added. The machine was at its best possible performance. “Junk PC” represents the performance of the computer after the 200 programs had been installed, while “Restored PC” represents the performance of the computer after the 200 programs had been uninstalled.

Boot-up performance

This benchmark measured the amount of time it took the machine to load the last automatically running program on the startup list.

It was almost back to normal. Windows 7 took 1 minute and 36 seconds to boot up.

This came to us as a bit of a surprise. After we removed the 200 programs, the boot-up time was almost completely restored to its original state. It took only 14 seconds longer than usual to fully load Windows. We figured it was because of the high degree of disk fragmentation. But, let’s be clear about something—what difference does 14 seconds really make, especially when the 200 programs made the PC boot up in more than seven minutes, right? Big thumbs up for Windows 7 here, as it did not let the programs ruin the boot-up process too much.

Shutdown performance

We then measured the time it took from clicking the “Shut Down” button to actually powering down.

The shutdown process returned to its original state.

Windows 7 took exactly 11 seconds to power down the machine, and that is exactly the way it was before we installed all of those programs. Fantastic!

Virus scan performance

We used Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) to test how long it took to scan 1.5 GByte worth of RAR archives.

The results went back to a normal level yet again. We were happy to see that the 200 programs did not have an impact on scanning performance. This was expected, as MSE’s performance entirely depended on the hard disk speed and processor power. And, since all of the unnecessary background processes from those 200 programs had been removed, there was no interference.

Application performance

The TuneUp Blog team also measured the performance of selected applications. We started with the time it took for Outlook 2010 Beta to load and display the first e-mail. We then started Google Chrome with eight tabs. Like the last run, we also tested how long it took our computer to fire up Windows Media Player and start playing a 1080p full HD video file.

The results were fascinating. No matter how often we tried, Google Chrome never returned to its original performance. Again, we think this is due to hard disk fragmentation. (Or, did any of these programs actually interfere with Google’s browser, so that it now takes 50% longer to start up?)

Windows Media Player needed much more time to load our test video file.

Windows Media Player produced another weird result. After we removed the 200 programs one by one, it needed nine seconds to load up the HD video file—six seconds longer than under a clean install. This is inexcusable and probably due to the many codecs that were added, replaced, and removed with some of the 200 programs. Don’t worry; we made sure that the Windows Prefetch feature optimized Windows Media Player, to make it launch faster.

Processor, graphics and memory performance

We watched WinRAR compress our three test files and frankly could not believe our eyes. Instead of taking two or three minutes (like we were used to), WinRAR needed more than four minutes to compress the files, which took even longer than when we loaded the PC with the 200 programs. There is simply no other explanation than that fragmentation really slowed down things. Even when we compressed the three files, deleted the ZIP file, restarted the PC, and repeated these steps five times, the results stayed the same.

During the compression, the CPU was never utilized more than 20%. That means hard disk performance really suffered from the 200 programs we installed.

Also, during the 1080p full HD playback benchmark, we noticed that every 10 to 15 minutes, the movie started to stutter for at least 10 seconds. This did not happen under the original and freshly installed Windows configuration.

Photo editing performance

Using Corel PhotoImpact X3, we applied the “Enhance” filter to a 30 MB image file. This test should have proved how fast both the processor and the graphics chip are able to render images.

Again, this task was slowed down by the 200 programs that created so much background activity. After removing all of the applications, everything went back to normal. Just like before the installation, PhotoImpact was able to enhance the picture in exactly 21 seconds.

Cinebench R10 performance

Cinebench is still one of our favorite benchmarks, as it clearly shows your PC’s processor and graphics chip’s capabilities. The more points you get, the faster your PC is.

Cinebench performance dropped as well, but the difference was quite minimal. It took just a bit longer to render the sample image on the screen, which resulted in a slightly lower score for our test laptop.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat performance

This benchmark is based on the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat, which was released in Q4 2009.

What a disaster! Gaming performance did not return to the original levels; it basically stayed the same (expect for the SunShafts test from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Again, we blame the high level of fragmentation. The game was not able to load all of the textures fast enough from the hard disk to ensure a continuous frame rate.

PCMark Vantage performance

PCMark Vantage was the last benchmark on our list. Again, this is an all around program that tests the PC in different areas, such as music editing, and gaming. The more points PCMark spits out in the end, the faster your PC is.

It was interesting to note that the machine was not able to achieve its original performance this time around. The total scores for our cleaned up system were better than the scores obtained with the 200 programs installed, which was expected, but we were unable to reach 2624 points, even though we performed the tests several times.

Overall performance and stability

In this last section of our test, we wanted to express our personal feelings—how responsive did we find the system and how we thought Windows 7 performed. We used the system for a full week for traveling, business, and a bit of gaming, as well. We edited photos and even hooked up an external Blu-ray drive to watch a couple of HD films. Overall, Windows 7 performed faster without the 200 programs installed, but we felt that the performance suffered quite a bit compared to the original state. Some of our programs did not start up as fast as they used to, menus took a bit longer to show up, and movies stuttered here and there. It was as if we were using a 1.4 GHz (rather than our 1.86 GHz) machine. The TuneUp Blog team believes the system’s performance was “good” when we first installed Windows 7, whereas now it’s only “okay”.

Leftovers and junk

Raw performance is one thing we wanted to take a look at; we were also very keen to see how many “leftovers” we had from the 200 programs, such as temporary files, unnecessary shortcuts, and empty and entire folders.

Let’s start with the desktop. Even though we got rid of all 200 programs, the desktop, especially the Start Menu, were still cluttered with dozens of invalid shortcuts and folders. The next thing we noticed was the number of files on the hard disk. On our clean PC, we had about 101,000 files (44.9 GByte in total). This number moved up to 190,000 files, which amounted to a total of 70.2 GByte, as we installed the 200 programs; this was a massive jump! The sad part was that, after we removed all of the programs, there were still 114.000 files left—and 53 GByte worth of data. There were two reasons for that. Firstly, uninstallers are not that effective; they leave traces behind! Secondly, the 200 programs created dozens of system restore points that amounted to a lot of unnecessary data.

Fragmentation had a big impact on performance. Before we started our rampage and installed the 200 programs, we regularly used TuneUp Utilities defragmentation feature to keep hard disk access times as fast as possible. So, the fragmentation level was usually 0-5% at most. After we installed and removed the 200 programs, TuneUp Drive Defrag told us that more than 54% of the hard disk was fragmented. This is probably the reason why the performance did not go back to normal levels.

Too much junk left

In some cases, performance could be restored by simply uninstalling the 200 programs. In other cases, and probably due to the mess we created, overall responsiveness and gaming tests in particular suffered immensely. The bottom line is that our test laptop wasn’t the same anymore. It was sluggish, and there was so much junk left on it, that the system was no fun to work with.

We were almost ready to back up the entire system and start from scratch. But, wait! That’s not fun either. How about we spice things up a bit? Curious? Just stay tuned for our next blog posts of this series.

Written by Christoph Laumann and Sandro Villinger

Read the next part of our 200 programs experiment – Performance and Stability Update.

This podcast is also available on TuneUp’s Mevio.com podcast channel here.

More programs equals less performance?

What most users are unaware of: Installing too many programs can result in problems and a massive decline in performance and stability. And it is not their fault—how should they know? Windows by itself does not do a really good job of telling users to get rid of programs they rarely use and that may cause issues. It is mostly long after the fact that people start asking themselves, “Why is my PC so slow?” or yell out, “My Windows crashes all the time!”

So what’s the cause behind all this? The more programs you download from the Web or install from a DVD, the more services, background processes, files, startup items, and registry entries will be created. Some software products even install new drivers, for example virtual DVD drives. This obviously puts more and more of a strain on your machine, because it needs to assign a certain amount of resources to the newly installed programs, and this, in return, reduces performance.

The question is: Is this drop in performance noticeable? We’ll find out in this exclusive real-life test run!

Our testing method

The “Clean PC”: To test the theory, we measured the performance of a computer with only a minimum set of programs installed. We call it the “Clean PC”.

As you can see, we have Office 2010 Beta, Google Earth, TuneUp Utilities, Windows Live Essentials, Media Player Classic, Microsoft Security Essentials, Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasties, Sony Media Go and PhotoImpact X3 installed. All the drivers are up to date and all Windows 7 updates have been installed.

The “Junk PC”: Then we installed exactly 200 software products that are widely used. We selected these 200 based on the most used programs on Wakoopa (a software usage tracker), the top downloads at Downloads.com, from various “Top 10 Programs you need” lists and from our personal experience with what our readers use most often. It is an even mixture of very popular and huge software suites—such as Pinnacle Studio 14 or Nero 9 Full—and useful freeware applications such as Skype, WinZip and Opera. We even selected some utter junk (for example, Screensavers) that we very often find on typical PCs used by kids. A full list of products we used is available for download here. We call this the “Junk PC”.

Selecting, downloading, cataloging, and especially installing these applications took literally more than two days and over 50 restarts. There was tremendous click-work and lots of waiting involved, believe us. Also, a lot of free and even commercial programs come with additional software such as toolbars. So when we speak of 200 additional programs, in reality it might come close to 250 due to tons of toolbars and advertising programs that came with the programs. We ran each of these programs at least once, to ensure that they were properly set up and working.

The machine we used was an ultra-thin laptop (a MacBook Air running Windows 7 via BootCamp) with a 1.86 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo L9400 processor, 2 Gigabyte of main memory, a GeForce 9400M graphics chipset and a 120 Gigabyte serial ATA hard drive.

The question is: Is there performance degradation? And if so, how much are we talking here? Do all the additional files, registry entries, background processes, and startup items of those 200 programs slow down the computer noticeably? Let’s find out!

And here they are… the results

So after almost going crazy from installing literally 200 applications, the fun part starts. Do a plethora of applications affect performance in any way? Here’s what we gathered:

Boot-up performance

The time it takes the machine once the power switch has been pressed to finally loading the last automatically running program on the startup list.

Windows 7 took over 5 ½ minutes longer to finally boot up

After the installation marathon, we basically restarted the computer at least 40 times and used the machine over a three day period to ensure that Windows 7 had optimized the startup process as best as it could. But still, it needed over 7 minutes to fully boot up and load up all the startup programs. Although the desktop was visible after about 2–3 minutes, due to the massive load it was impossible to use the machine.
Note: On a couple of boot up attempts, the machine simply froze a couple of seconds after the desktop displayed.

Shutdown performance

The time it takes from clicking the “Shut down” button to actual power down.

During shutdown, Windows 7 simply froze up

Apparently, some of the new services and background processes caused Windows 7 to freeze during shutdown. We waited literally more than 20 minutes, but nothing happened. In only one of about a dozen shutdown attempts did the machine actually power down correctly—and that took exactly 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Virus scan performance

We used Microsoft Security Essentials to test how long it takes to scan 1.5 GByte worth of RAR archives.

It took MSE nearly twice as long to complete the virus scan after the 200 programs had been installed on the machine.

Application performance

Here we measure the performance of selected applications. We start by measuring the time it takes for Outlook 2010 Beta to load and display the first e-mail. We move over and start Google Chrome with 8 tabs. We did not measure how long it took to actually display the Web sites, as that depends entirely on the Internet connection.
In the last run, we tested how long it took our test computer to fire up Windows Media Player and start playing a 1080p Full HD video file.

No surprise here, Outlook took almost twice as long to start up—same with the Google browser. We’ve also waited twice as long until the Full HD video clip started playing in Windows Media Player. This is absolutely intolerable. It felt like we were using Windows 7 on a 10 year old machine and not from a laptop bought in 2009.

Processor, graphics, and memory performance

We compress three video files (each about 350 MByte in size) to a single ZIP file, which took a significant amount of time—even before we “ruined” our machine with the massive amount of programs we put on this little machine. After that, it took almost 45 seconds longer—probably due to the massive load put on the CPU and the hard disk.

The video file wouldn’t even play smoothly for more than a couple of seconds. On one test run, Windows Media Player simply froze up on us.

Photo editing performance

Using PhotoImpact X3, we took a 30 MByte TIF graphic and applied the “Enhance” filter that is supposed to enhance colors and picture quality. We measured the exact time needed for the filter to take effect on the image.

Surprise, this rather GPU-intense task took only 3 seconds longer on the junked up configuration. Not a drastic performance reduction that we experienced in basically every other benchmark we ran.

Cinebench R10 performance

Cinebench is a leading benchmark for 3D animation performance based on the very popular CINEMA 4D animation software. The benchmark generates a score that represents the performance of a computer and that can be used to compare performances between different configurations. The higher the numbers, the better the performance of the PC.

It was no surprise either, that rendering the 3D animation took noticeably longer on the Junk PC configuration. This resulted in a significantly lower score on each test run of Cinebench R10.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat performance

A benchmark based on the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat released in Q4 2009.

Stalker suffered a great deal. The already pretty low-frame rate went down to an absolute unbearable 1–3 frames per second, depending on the scene and details on screen. It seems that games with massive textures and details suffer the most from a junked up computer.

PC Mark Vantage performance

PC Mark Vantage is a set of benchmark tools designed to test the speed of the CPU, and read/write speeds of the memory and hard disks. It also tests the machine by automatically performing tasks such as playing multiple video files, editing photos, or filling up WordPad with dozens of pages of text. At the end of the test, the benchmark calculates a score that is used to determine the performance of a computer. The higher the score, the faster your machine performs. We used the “default run” here.

It was shocking to see the total PC Mark Vantage score go down from 2624 to 1092 due to the massive amount of programs installed. We were, however, surprised that both the HDD test, the music and the gaming test were not affected that much from all this new background activity going on.

Overall performance and stability from the user perspective

Benchmarks test in pure numbers. What we test in this last “benchmark” is the performance from our point of view: The overall responsiveness when launching and switching between programs and Windows or when clicking on menus.
After the 200 programs were installed, you had to wait a few seconds until any window opened. It took about 25 seconds until the “Computer” and the “Control Panel” windows opened. Some programs did not even launch anymore or caused the computer to lock up. It took a few seconds until even the smallest context menus showed after a right-click. Granted, the system we used is not the most powerful high-end machine, but it is not out of date by any means. Still, everything seemed to run as slow as molasses.

Conclusion: massive performance hit! Advice: limit what you install

We expected a noticeable drop in performance before we started this experiment, but certainly not over 200% in some benchmarks. By installing that many programs, we simply ruined our machine to the point where it was absolutely no fun at all to work with it. Starting with the boot process: It was incredibly slow and after the logon over two dozen advertising windows, pop-up balloons, and program logos appeared, before we could click on anything. Even a couple of error messages showed up.

The performance of the poor machine became horrid, as it took over 30 seconds to start Windows Explorer even after the machine fully booted. Opening even a very lightweight application like Excel 2010 took almost a minute. It was simply embarrassingly slow.

We suggest a couple of rules

• Before you install any piece of software, think long and hard if you actually need it or plan to use it regularly. If you just need it once, remember to uninstall it.
• Go through the list of all your installed programs and decide if you still need all of these programs. Check out the TuneUp Blog Diary: Removing Unused Programs on My Mom’s Windows PC post.
• To further clean up your system, read the How To: Disable Unnecessary Features in Windows Vista and 7 post.
• Be sure that only the most necessary startup applications are loaded automatically when you turn your PC on. Read our post How to Reduce Windows Startup Time post for more information.
• Install new software within a virtual machine. That’s a simulated PC with an operating system! You can basically wreak havoc in this environment and test all kinds of programs without affecting your own PC. Try out free solutions from Sun or Microsoft. Note: You need a Windows XP CD, Vista DVD, or Windows 7 DVD and an additional license to install the virtual operating system.

Stick to our advice and watch out which and how many programs you install on your machine. Yes, this test was an experiment, but we have actually seen many computers in the last couple of months that have been messed up like that. In an upcoming blog post, we will show you the best way to handle even these chaotic machines without actually having to reinstall them. Stay tuned!

Written by Christoph Laumann and Sandro Villinger

Read the next part of our 200 programs experiment – Can the original performance be restored by removing all of these unnecessary applications?