I was worried today about the performance of my Vista laptop, I even emailed Dave Overton and he kindly replied probably thinking that I was just being stupid. What I learnt that I have to understand Vista better because it’s doing things which I don’t fully understand. It’s not entirely my fault as it is a completely new operating system with a lot of clever stuff in it. What I did find regarding the performance of Vista on my laptop is that Trend’s PC Cillin seemed to be a resource hog and surprisingly the standard Vista sidebar gadgets are as well. The sidebar was peaking up to 50% cpu utilisation over short periods of time. I’ve just exited the sidebar and uninstalled PC Cillin.
Vista has a number of things which can make your machine seem like it’s treading treacle sometimes. The VSS feature takes snapshots of files, the search indexing is running and the prefetch is also in play. The other observation is that performance improves significantly over time after first switch on. The Reliability and Performance tool is great and gives some detailed information on CPU, Disk, Network and Memory. There are a load of services running which it is difficult to know which ones could be disabled without losing major functionality?
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May 26th, 2007 at 9:12 am
I often wonder whether SuperFetch is a blessing or a curse. It sounds like a great idea in principle, but what I did Yesterday is completely different from what I will do Tomorrow. I draw a parallel with the old dynamic user interface of Office, where it tried to hide the menu items that you never used and put the ones you use at the top of the list. The trouble with that is you end up with a menu structure where you can never find anything because nothing is ever in the same place twice. The Windows start menu is the same. In the end, I think consistency is more important than trying to second-guess what I’m about to do.
For the same reasons, I think that for a lot of people, SuperFetch will just introduce a big hysteresis curve as it tries to load stuff that in theory the user might need, but in reality is just wasted cycles.
It’s true that in some cases predictive caching can work well, but certainly not in all cases. It’s no good to me that SUperFetch will figure out my new usage patterns in two days or even two hours, when I need to run a new program now and get a job done.
All this is just speculation of course - I haven’t carried out any objective tests.
One feature that does work well is ReadyBoost. If you haven’t tried it, then you owe it to yourself to plug in a 2Gb USB 2.0 memory drive and watch your performance take off. Once you;ve got it set up, load a few office applications. Now quit from those applications and load them again. See the difference?