Useful Tools for PC Tweaking

Windows 7

Soluto

It is basically a tool that you can enhance your startup and boot times with.

There are options to delay an application’s startup after boot which you do no immediately need when your PC starts up or completely disable it from starting up. You can also choose to keep it in your boot sequence if you don’t want to mess around with it.

It will creat 3 categories of programs in your bootup sequence.

• - Green is what you can edit without worries of messing up anything (some programs like Hamachi seems to be an exception to this though.)
• - Orange is programs which might cause troubles if taken out of booting early such as drivers etc. There might be a couple of things not needed here though (Skype or MSN etc.)
• - Grey is basically stuff you really don’t want to mess with and probably unable to disable anyway.

It puts delayed or disabled programs in a blue color so you can enable them again if something goes bad.

I found it to be fairly useful and giving faster boot times considerably and also having an easy to use interface with lots of helpful information on-screen.

Multi Core Boot-Up (This seems to be a myth riding around the internet. Some report it has improved their boot up times some say its a hoax and only a testing or debugging option. Up to you to decide if it’s worth a try. I have tried it just in case, seemingly haven’t helped much.)

To use more cores at boot time, you have to change a manual setting as follows.

1. Click on: [Start]
2. Click on: Run…
3. Type in: msconfig
4. Click on: [OK]
5. Click on the tab: Boot
6. Adjust the number of cores to the number your processor actually has.
7. Click on: [OK]

General Operating System Tweaking

There are quite a few programs around which can tweak windows 7 to improve performance and disable unnecessary functions and services.

Windows 7 Manager

This is what I use for tweaking up my system.

It’s most important options that I use:

Optimizer Menu – System Speed – System Tab

• - Enable SATA disk advanced function to improve performance.
• - Turned off Search indexer.
• - Disabled zip and cab compressed folders. (Only if you have a third party Archiver program installed such as WinRAR etc.)
• - Disabled Windows Compatibility Assistant.
• - Enabled AHCI features (IMPORTANT: Needs to be enabled in BIOS settings and a correctly set up hardware environment that supports AHCI.)

Optimizer Menu – System Speed – RAM and Disk Cache Tab

You just need to press “Query” in the different sections and adjust your options according to the results.

That’s about it for my settings in Optimizer. I also have Prefetcher and Superfetch features disabled in my Windows 7 since I use an SSD and it’s recommended to disable them. You can mess around with the other settings aswell if you find any of them useful to your needs. The tooltips should help.

Network Menu – System Network – Accelerate Network Tab

Just set your type of network here and it will optimize settings for it.

You can try Disabling/Enabling TCP Auto Tuning if you’d like i haven’t noticed any difference between it’s settings.

Network Menu – System Network –  Tweak Network

I have everything Disabled here.

• - “Enable TCP half open connections limit” (Disabling this will greatly increase peer to peer applications bandwidth like utorrent, etc…)

Cleaner Menu – Junk File Cleaner

Using this once in a  while can free up some space for you. Only removes temporary and backup files which are obsolete.

Cleaner Menu – Registry Cleaner

Using this regularly to clear up obsolete registry entries and fixing errors. Wise to create a backup of your registry when you use it. Haven’t had any issues messing up my windows while using it.
GameBooster

This is a tool that can defragment your game folders and files for faster load times and boost your PC when you enable Gaming mode by disabling unnecessary services/programs. When you’re done you just press back to normal and everything starts up again. Might free up some memory though I’m not sure if it frees up any CPU cycles. Might be worth giving it a try.

Anti-Virus & Firewall

Having an anti-virus software is essential these days even though it can add a pretty heavy system usage on your PC’s shoulder. If your anti virus has a silent or background mode which doesn’t always turn on automatically, turn it on if you are gaming. It might free up some processing power you need. Personally I’m using Norton IIS 2011 because I trust it the most and has a silent mode. 

Disk Defragmentation

It is wise to have a tool to defragment your HDDs once in a  while. (Don’t defragment SSDs though it has no use. There is a TRIM function that essentially does similarly as a regular defragmentation except it’s much more complicated. SSDs usually come with their own supported drivers and software that can do this manually or on a schedule.)

I have been using two defrag programs so far, both containing lots of features. Disktrix – Ultimate Defrag and O&O Defrag

The latter being heavier and designed for servers even multiple ways to arrange your files other than only defragmenting them.

This is it for now. If I find anything new I’ll add it to the list

/cheers Burx