Vista Vexes

by Jan Fagerholm

July 2007

If you’ve used Vista longer than a day, you’ve doubtless noticed longer startup times and slower system performance than you had with Windows XP. Vista’s speed (or, rather, the lack of it) is the single most common problem users report to the computer press. Sure, Vista is a more complex system than XP is, but that doesn’t explain it all.

One of the biggest drags on startup time is USB devices that are plugged in during startup. Vista probes USB devices deeper than XP did, and so it wastes a lot of time poking into USB devices to see if there’s anything it should do. My informal testing with a stopwatch shows that unplugging USB hubs and flash drives before turning on the computer reduce startup times about 50%. Unplugging USB speakers doesn’t seem to make a noticeable difference, but unplugging a USB hub does. The largest improvement occurs if I remove the ReadyBoost-equipped flash drive, as Windows spends a lot of time loading system files into it during startup. Plugging it in after the desktop settles down, Vista starts loading system files into it, but the impact on desktop responsiveness is not enough to be objectionable.

The largest improvement comes from a choice of hard drives for Vista. Yes, bigger is better, but not any faster. Recent motherboards support RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology, and Vista user should take advantage of it. Microsoft operating systems all use the hard drive for virtual memory at all times, regardless of how much RAM you have in the system. Hard drives are roughly 200 times slower than any other component in a PC, and increasing hard drive performance improves system response more than any other component. Rather than getting a single 750 GB drive (about $200), get two 320 GB drives (about $80 each, $160 total). Set up the two drives as a RAID 0 array. Vista sees them as a single 640GB drive, and you have just doubled your hard drive performance. You really want to do this. The difference is dramatic.

ReadyBoost is in the category of, “it’s so cheap there’s no reason not to do it”. I’ve explained ReadyBoost previously, so I’ll just summarize here: a ReadyBoost-capable flash drive is one that Vista can use to store system files, so they don’t have to be paged out to the hard drive. Flash drives have way better transfer rates than hard drives, so system response is improved noticeably. Regardless of the amount of RAM you install, Vista will happily fill all of it with system files during startup, then page them to the hard drive when you start using applications. Even a 2 GB-equipped computer will show a noticeable improvement with a 2 GB ReadyBoost flash drive plugged in. At $29, a 2 GB ReadyBoost flash drive is a reasonable performance tweak that Vista will use regardless of the amount of RAM you install.

Vista wants more attention to performance items than previous Microsoft operating systems. While some of these recommendations are not cheap, using any of them will improve your Vista experience.