Looking for Windows Vista Performance Issues

Matt recently came to the defense of Windows Vista, a good read.  I too think Windows Vista has gotten a bad wrap for a lot of things that it can't control and rather than pile onto the problem I thought I would highlight ways you can make things better before you went down a road back to Windows XP.

Most if not all of the performance problems I have ever seen in my several years now using Windows Vista have been related to 3rd party Applications, Services, and Drivers.  We will take a look at each of these and show some of the thing you can do to improve your systems performance and some of the tools available to help you get to the bottom of them.

Applications

More and more systems are shipping with bloat-ware that slows down the overall performance of the system.  These are becoming more prevalent because the hardware manufactures get money for the bundled software. The first thing I normally do after I get a systems from an OEM is put a plain copy of Windows Vista on a system and try to install only drivers that are available from Windows Update (If I can help it).  This should give you a good baseline of the boot and shutdown time that your machine is capable of as you load other software.

Since most people don't have that luxury the next best thing you can do is to uninstall all unwanted software from the Programs control panel applet.  Now don't go crazy do a little research on what the application is before you start killing it off, target those that have a startup component or system services that are unwanted and unneeded. This will get your the most win for your effort.

The easiest way to find applications that are launching from startup is to use the MSConfig system utility. This utility does a pretty good job of showing you all the startup components and allows you to test disabling them before you make the removal permanent.

As you can see from just this partial screenshot of things starting up on my system these can add up quick with just the normal use.  Most of these I would be able to remove from my system.

Services

The latest craze seems to be creating a service for many things.  You have to keep an eye on these more as more and more software vendors will start using this as a way around UAC prompts.

You will notice that even Microsoft isn't immune to this as Windows Live is using a service so keep this in mind where you are looking to figure out why you machine is running sluggish.  Many of these are running all the time taking up memory and processor.

Now rather than blindly disable services we need to target the ones that are actually a problem.  Microsoft has recently put out a new tool set called the Windows Performance Tools Kit that can help you find out just which ones to go after. This set of tools will capture performance metrics and has a useful graphical tool to help analyze the results.  The tool you should become the most familiar with is xbootmgr, in my opinion.

Using this tool set alone we recently cut almost 30 seconds from our shutdown time by identifying problem areas and correcting them.

Drivers

Drivers are lesser known cause of performance problems, and more difficult to do much about, but they can have a significant impact.  Take a video driver or a wifi driver that was poorly written one of these can cause your systems to lose 20-30 seconds each time you resume from sleep.  It may not seem like that much, but all of these issues add up to eventually give people the impression that their system is sluggish or slow, sometimes painfully so and none of it is in direct control of them or even Microsoft, per se.

You can also use the Windows Performance Tool Kit to help trouble shoot driver issues as well and while this is not for the faint of heart it can be done.

My desire going forward would be that Microsoft add very stringent performance criteria to the Window Logo certification process for both applications and drivers.  This would force 3rd party developers to deal with performance issues before they could get their driver signed and up on Windows Update and way before a Windows customer had the feel any of the pain.

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