NBR Vista Tips and Tweaks Guide

[comper]

+ Rep just for the first tip, that little delay ALWAYS annoyed me since I switched to Vista a few months ago. The faster boot-up tweak is very nice as well. Good job so far, I'm looking forward to some more tweaks!

[The Cheat]

lol i just did the defrag, and it took me under 5 min.... im going to reboot now and see the results.. and great tips.

on first reboot... much slower but going on what some people have said it will improve...

[elscorcho]

one last point, the best feature you can use on your desktop is the Vista's sleep. so long as your computer supports S3 sleep mode, it'll shut everything off on the computer except for 2-5 watts so that the RAM retains its data. from sleep to desktop, my computer takes no more than 5 seconds to be fully functional.

[trebuin]

Here's my contribution:

Open Device Manager. Expand the Disk Drive tree by clicking the "+" sign. Right click on your hard drive and select Properties, which will open a new window. Click the Policies tab at the top. "Enable Write Caching on the Disk" will be checked by default. Also check "Enable Advanced Performance". Click OK. Close Device Manager.

I'll ditto this post. I've used this, but keep in mind that this is extremely sensitive to forced power off or power outage. I would not use this on a desktop without a battery backup and I would make sure that you are finished messing with your computer.

[KnightUnit]

Mine has been on "Rearranging boot files", "Do not reboot before degfragmation is done" & "cleaning up" at bottom of message for over an hour. Nothing to do with defrag in TM. What should i do?

[Les]

Icedout...I have this as well and its my antivirus program (AVG); it may be something similar for you.

[Les]

I want to thank everyone for the help in this thread but can I ask that any responses with new tweaks get pm'd to me and I will post them in time, giving the author appropriate credit.

The reason for this is because I wouldn't want to see a tweak get entered that isn't necessarily a healthy tweak, one which can't be undone before its too late.

Conversely, I wouldn't want to see a tweak get included that will cause a great deal of discussion before I can explain all sides to the particular tweak.

This would be the case with the Disk Caching Tweak as it is not available to everyone. For many, if Intel Matrix Storage Manager is installed, this tweak will not work. They can check off "Enable Write Caching' and 'Enable Advanced Performance' (photo below) as many times as their little heart desires but, as soon as they exit they are unchecked again by the Manager. Some may start to post thinking their is something wrong with their system when there actually is not.

This is the exact situation in my case yet, my disk performance is the best its ever been; I have attached HDTune results to verify.

This is also the case with RMClock where it is such a controversial fix. On one side, it eliminates the noise yet on the other, I have experienced all versions to significantly reduce battery life and we don't quite know the long term effects of preventing our systems from entering low power sleep modes.

PS. Having written this, I still want to encourage discussion and response about any of the tweaks that I post as this will be the strength of the thread itself. Many will become comfortable with tweaks knowing others have had such success, this being the case with Tweak #2.

[batkinson001]

Here's my contribution:

Open Device Manager. Expand the Disk Drive tree by clicking the "+" sign. Right click on your hard drive and select Properties, which will open a new window. Click the Policies tab at the top. "Enable Write Caching on the Disk" will be checked by default. Also check "Enable Advanced Performance". Click OK. Close Device Manager.

is it safe to do this even on a laptop?

[Les]

I addressed it in my above thread. yes its safe but it may not work if Intel Matrix has been installed.

[deputy963]

Yes, it's safe. As Flamenko stated, there is an issue with the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. This would also apply to any software RAID implementation or controller. In that case the option will be grayed out, or will revert to defualt.