Master Tutorial to Make Your Windows 7 Super Fast



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This is the 3rd tutorial of our "Master Tutorial" series. We have already posted 2 other tutorials for Windows XP and Windows Vista in past and now its turn of Windows 7.

Although Windows 7 is already very fast and reliable but this tutorial will help you in getting the max performance out of your system.

So without wasting any time, here we start our tutorial:

1. Registry Tweaks:

Following topic contains a few registry tweaks to optimize your system performance and add a few useful extras:

Collection of Registry Tweaks for Windows 7

You just need to download the ZIP file, extract it and run the file. It'll ask for confirmation, accept it. Restart your system to take affect.

2. Right-click on Computer icon on Desktop and select Properties (or press WIN + Pause/Break keys). Now click on Advanced system settings link in left side pane (You can open it directly by giving sysdm.cpl command in RUN or start menu search box). Now click on Settings button in Performance section:

It'll open another window. Disable all unnecessary options in Visual Effects tab, you can leave following options enabled according to your requirements:

  • Enable Aero Peek (If you want to use Aero Peek feature)
  • Enable desktop composition (If you want to use Windows Aero theme)
  • Enable transparent glass (If you want to use transparency in Windows)
  • Show thumbnails instead of icons (If you want to show thumbnails in Explorer)
  • Show window contents while dragging (If you want windows to show contents while moving them)
  • Smooth edges of screen fonts (If you want to show smooth fonts)
  • Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop (If you want to show shadows under desktop icon labels)
  • Use visual styles on windows and buttons (If you want to use Windows Aero or Basic theme)

3. Open Windows Explorer and go to "Organize -> Folder and Search Options" and click on "View" tab.

Now disable following options:

  • Display file size information in folder tips
  • Hide extensions for known file types
  • Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color
  • Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items

4. Right-click on Computer icon on Desktop and select Manage (You can also open it directly by giving services.msc command in RUN or start menu search box).

Now go to Services & Applications -> Services. Here you can set a few unnecessary services to Manual, so that these services don't start automatically with Windows and you can get a faster startup.

Visit following tutorial to know which services can be set to MANUAL to increase system performance:

Windows 7 Services that can be Safely set to MANUAL

5. Type msconfig in RUN or Startmenu search box and press Enter. Now go to Startup tab and disable unwanted startup entries. You can disable your graphics card's driver utility, Sound Card utility, etc to speed up the system startup and to increase system performance.

6. Open Sound applet in Control Panel (or type mmsys.cpl in RUN or Startmenu search box and press Enter). Now go to Sounds tab and select No Sounds from Sound Scheme section. You can keep some of your favorite sounds enabled but make sure to set Exit Windows, Windows Log off, Windows Logon and Start Navigation to (None).

Also disable "Play Windows Startup sound" option to disable the sound clip which is played at login screen.

7. Also don't forget to:

  • Defrag the hard disk regularly
  • Install only necessary software
  • Use the latest device drivers
  • Keep your Windows up-to-date

After following all the above mentioned points, you'll definitely notice major improvements in your Windows 7 performance.

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This article was posted in Windows 7.


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61 Comments

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  • VG

    ^^ I assure these tweaks are absolutely safe to apply. All tweaks have been tested on various machines before posting here. It might be some other problem or you disabled some required services.

  • Larry Miller

    There seems to be some confusion in the comments about virtual memory and the pagefile. Not surprising as even some Microsoft articles get it wrong.

    Some things to keep in mind:

    #1 THE PAGEFILE IS NOT VIRTUAL MEMORY. This belief has caused an enormous amount of confusion. The pagefile has only a supporting role in the virtual memory system.

    #2. Virtual memory is a complex and sophisticated system for both accessing and managing physical memory. Applications use virtual memory exclusively and can never access RAM directly. The system provides a virtual address space of 4GB to each application that is independent of the size of RAM. 2GB of this is private to each application and 2GB is used by the system.

    #3 You can never disable virtual memory. You can disable the pagefile but this will NOT disable virtual memory.

    #4 The pagefile is used to optimize the use of RAM. It does this by freeing RAM from the burden of holding stale data that has not been accesed recently, and may indeed never be accessed again. This leaves more RAM for more important purposes.

    #5 Paging occurs with many files on the harddisk, not just the pagefile. In fact, the majority of paging that involves disk access (the minority), only about 10% will use the pagefile. Paging from these other files can not be disabled.

    #6. In the large majority of cases the default pagefile configuration is optimum, or as close as to make no difference. Unless you have a very specific need, and you understand what you are doing, leave these settings alone. The same applies to most other system settings as well.

    Larry Miller
    Microsoft MCSA

  • PetFoodz.Info

    For users wishing to remove entries from msconfig - startup google MSConfig Cleanup.. Great small little tool..

  • Tsukune Aono

    Hey VG I read your guide and not to sound mean or offending but its incredibly outdated. Business companies already have their hands on Windows 7 and if you use auslogics and ccleaner you'll be better off than messing with the registry.

  • spork

    Fortunately or unfortunately, this could be titled "how to speed up Vista" or "how to speed up XP."

  • viswanath

    Hi vishal. I see a problem with VISTA. when i look into the performance tab of task manager , i notice that the cache size keep increasing and free ram keep decreasing. At this point of time my laptop with 4gb of memory becomes very slow. Please suggest me a solution.

  • viswanath

    eventualyy free ram becomes 0 when the cahe is full with all memory and laptop becomes slow

  • Carlos

    I noticed 7 does not have the boot defragmentation option on the registry, so should we create it to enable it?(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Dfrg\ BootOptimizeFunction)

  • VG

    ^^ Yes.

    @viswanath
    Did you follow "Make Windows Vista Super Fast" tutorial?

  • Carlos

    Thanks for the quick reply.. but.. there're a lot of registry keys we need to add and I don't know exactly the names of those strings and such.. so, can you make the registry collection of this things?

    Thanks!

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