Get back Vista space and time

Here is a small guide that I put together from various gathered information about reclaiming some of your disk space and speeding up boot times for Vista. I personally use these steps on customer machines and with my personal also. Please use this at your own risk. I have no problems after any of these but as you all know every machine has its own ghosts. I see a lot of threads on the Lenovo thread and know that searching is a real pain sometimes.

A good tool to find out what is eating up your space is WinDirStat. This graphically allows you to click on pieces of your hard drive and identify where all the space is going.

**first and foremost...always good practice to follow the site's clean install guide and start fresh. For the most gain, trash the system restore partition and do your own backup.

1. Hibernation. If you dont need it, turn it off. If you look at hyberfil.sys, this usually takes up a nice chunk of usable space.
-At the command prompt type "powercfg -h off"
-After a reboot, the file should be gone.

2. Limit the system restore file usage. System restore is a great tool that has saved my skin a few times. But I certainly dont

need to save as many as the default system allow. This also aids in bootup speed because indexing time is reduced. Here's how to see what yours is using and how to limit it.
-At the command prompt type " vssadmin List ShadowStorage", this will list what you are using currently
-to limit the size of your disk type this command " vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /MaxSize=XGB" (where "XGB" is the number of GB you want to allocate) I use 3GB and gives me at least 15-20 days or 10 or so restore points.
*this also limits shadowcopy, which limits the number of accidentally deleted files or "previous versions" that can

be restored.

3. Use vsp1cln.exe to delete unneeded restore files and updated files from SP1. You will not be able to uninstall SP1 after

this.This takes only a few seconds.
-At the command prompt type " vsp1cln.exe"
-Type " Y" when prompted

Speed tweaks

1. Enable Advanced Performance on your hard drive. This enables direct writing to cache. This is generally safe for laptops

because if you lose power you could lose data while its writing from the cache to your disk.
-In device manager->Right click your drive->Properties->Policies tab->enable advanced performance

2. Choose multi processor on bootup. This usually shaves a few seconds off the boot.
-type " msconfig" in the run box
-under the boot tab click advanced options
-click the "number of processors" box and select 2. (Assuming that you are running dual core)
-click "ok" twice and select the box when prompted to not warn you after reboot. then reboot.

3. If you dont use Windows search often then you can reduce indexing
-control panel->performance->adjust indexing options
-click "modify"
-Select the "Show all locations" button
-Double click "Users" in the "Summary of selected locations"
-Uncheck Users directory
-Double click "Start Menu" in the "Summary of selected locations"
-Uncheck Start Menu directory
-Select the Ok button to close the panel

*other options that help
- TweakIV Basic is a great tool to automate alot of tweak processes
- Auslogicsdisk and registry defrag work great, are free and fast
-SP1 fixed a lot of services starting up but there are many more to be stopped and tweaked. You can search for disabling services in Vista. There are also some good threads on this forum.

Feel free to add whatever your thoughts and other tweaks you have in your toolbox.

 

Thanks, I learned a couple things here. rep.

 

I would strongly disagree with allowing direct cache writes on a laptop. It will offer a speed improvement that few will recognize while begging for the opportunity to corrupt data during a hard power down.

 

Yeah, the Advanced Performance for HDD makes more sense on desktops which are always connected to a power source rather than laptops which are rarely always connected.

Also, a 3rd party disk defragmenter is not really necessary in Vista as the built-in one does a pretty good job on its own.

With regard to hibernation...
What I've noticed on my 2 Thinkpads as well as others in the household is that hibernation isn't all that useful in speeding up boot/power-down timings if you've got more than 2Gb RAM. As everything in memory is saved on to the drives during hibernation, the more RAM one has, the longer hibernation takes.
I haven't done any "scientific" measurements, but my T60 hibernates twice as fast as my X61s, while the latter boots up and shuts down twice as fast. I don't think the different platforms (Core Duo vs Core2Duo) makes much of a difference here... more so since my mother's X61 with 2Gb RAM hibernates and resumes about as fast as my T60. Sure, Vista on the X61 and X61s does help with the faster boot-ups/shutdowns, but amount of RAM "seems" to be major determinant of hibernation/resuming speeds. So, if one has 4Gb RAM, I'd advice NOT enabling hibernation.

True, cutting down on system restore space usage does restore quite a bit of valuable space, but unless one has a 3rd-party backup (Acronis, Ghost, DriveXML, etc) handy, system restore is best left alone. While all you're suggesting is to reduce the space usage, you'll never know if the restore point you'll need tomorrow is the one that got cleared today because of space restraints.
Ultimately, an external backup using any of the above mentioned imaging apps would be ideal. Then, system restore can be completely disabled.

One can avoid having to remove SP1 installation files if one integrates SP1 into the RTM disc. Good advice nonetheless as not many are aware of this option.

Indexing in Vista usually only occurs soon after a fresh install. After a few days, the crazy disk activity drops considerably, and with the end result of having almost instant searches, it makes no sense to disable indexing. Using a 3rd party search app in Vista, again makes no sense as it will add on "bloat" and will usually also need to index your drives before being able to provide the same quick search results as the the built-in search in Vista.

Sometimes I wish that I didn't have to use XP anymore. It's so much easier to get a Vista system started, maintained and chugging than to install so many 3rd party programs in XP just to get it to keep pace.
Vista x64 FTW!!

 

i do agree with you wolf, but wouldnt a hard shut down corrupt working data regardless if you are on a laptop or a desktop? A laptop has two power sources and most have auto shutdown on battery which intern will not lose your data as where a power loss on a desktop would.

 

A hard shut down will not always corrupt your files but it will about 80% of the tme

 

agreed, but its very slow compared to auslogics.

The best reason for rid yourself of hibernation IMO is to free up the space.
Indexing does not kill your drive after the big initial, but thats why I put it as a tweak.

 

Not so.

A hard shut down will be given the chance to corrupt data only if direct cache writing is enabled.

If it is not enabled, the hard drive will not be prone to corrupted data during hard power-downs.

When we enable direct caching, we're sending data to the hard drive's cache without confirming that it was actually written to disk (a bit of a simplification). Say we hard power-down the computer at this stage. Data is in the cache but not actually written to the hard drive. Yet the computer assumes that it actually was written to the hard drive. Now we have a problem, with data corruption is the result.

If we disable direct cache writing, when the computer sends data to the drive cache it waits for a confirmation that the data was actually written to the drive itself before assuming that it is indeed present on the disk. Now if we hard power-down the computer we're no worse for the wear. Some data may have been written to the cache only and not the hard disk, but since no "confirmation" signal was given that the data was actually written to disk (called a write-request completion signal), the computer does not assume that the data made it to the disk.

As an aside, this is the reason high-end RAID controllers offer battery packs that you can attach to your RAID card in case of power-outages. Their sole purpose is to retain the data stored in cache on a computer with direct cache writes enabled (write-back caching) until the computer is powered back on to prevent data corruption.

 

wolf,
great explanation. definetely true, but if you HARD shut down your machine chances are it is locked up and thats a guessing game on tasks were actually completed. also, this is all based on your computer losing power or locking up which neither should be a norm. Nonetheless, great point thanks for the input.