ReadyBoost is perhaps one of the few truly nifty improvements in Windows Vista: the ability to add an additional layer of RAM to your machine without actually adding any RAM modules. The idea is fairly simple, but before I get into that, a brief primer on the various types of memory in a computer system.

The fastest memory in the computer is the cache built into the CPU itself. This memory is very tiny and expensive to create, but it’s blindingly fast. The next layer of memory is RAM, which is slower than the on-die processor cache, but larger and cheaper to create. Typically, the final layer of memory is the hard disk. The hard disk is significantly slower than RAM (RAM is about 50x faster in most cases), largely because of the necessity to seek to a location on the disk in order to read data. The hard disk is also non-volatile storage. A power loss does not eliminate the data contained on the drive, unlike in the cases of the CPU cache and RAM chips. In one of the machines I’ve got here, the speeds are as follows:

• CPU L1 cache (64KB) 11-12 GB/s
• CPU L2 cache (2048KB) 6-7 GB/s
• System RAM (2048MB) 2-3 GB/s
• Hard drive (100GB) 20-40MB/s

Now that you have an idea of how the speeds typically run, I should explain what ReadyBoost does. ReadyBoost allows you to add a new layer of memory, between the system RAM and hard drive layers in the list above. With ReadyBoost, you can turn any reasonably fast thumbdrive into a disk cache. Common reads from the hard drive can be stored in the thumbdrive’s memory. For instance, when you start your web browser, you’re touching dozens of different files (the browser’s main executable, any DLLs it depends on, etc). If you run the program enough, it will be cached on the ReadyBoost-managed thumbdrive so that the next time those files are accessed, they can be read much much quicker than if they were being read from the hard drive itself. This also makes it so that the hard drive is available for other read/write operations and eliminates a lot of seek time and read time.

eBoostr kind of beats the pants off of ReadyBoost, though. One of eBoostr’s advantages is the ability to use more than one cache device at a time, but there’s an even bigger advantage. Not only can you use a thumbdrive as a disk cache, but you can also use extra system RAM as a disk cache. For instance, in my MacBook Pro, I’ve got 3GB of RAM. I very very rarely use up more than a gigabyte or maybe one and a half gigabytes, even when gaming. So what I have done with eBoostr is assign 1GB of it to act as a disk cache. The speed improvement is extraordinary! Typically, it is on the order of 10 to 100 times the speed of a disk read.

eBoostr also collects statistics about which files are accessed frequently to improve its caching mechanisms. I recently installed eBoostr on my mother’s laptop, which she uses frequently for predictable tasks. She runs Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Live Messenger, Solitaire, FreeCell, and a select few other apps quite frequently. She sparingly uses other programs, and eBoostr knows this. I looked at eBoostr’s cache hit rate on her machine, and it sticks at about 95% all the time. This means that for 95% of disk reads, they are taken directly from her RAM cache. For a machine like hers, this offers a 30x speed increase for those particular reads.

In my case, though, the statistical analysis that eBoostr tries isn’t quite as helpful. I have a fairly unpredictable usage schedule. I will use Outlook, Firefox, Skype, Cygwin, Visual Studio and various apps that come and go on my machine as I decide I do or don’t want them. My hit rate stays at about 85%, which is still fantastic.

I very highly recommend eBoostr for anyone running Windows XP. It’s a great product, and really should be supported!

Alright, I’d better give bit of technical info for suspicious geeks. I do realize that there are a ton of scam products out there which claim to “make computers faster”, but eBoostr is one of a handful of technically feasible products. The way eBoostr works is that it installs a system driver which hooks any sort of disk I/O. If there’s a write to a file that’s in the cache, eBoostr marks that item invalid and re-caches it on the next read of that file. If there’s a read, eBoostr checks if it’s in the cache, and if it is, it throws the cached file back at the program instead of allowing a hard drive read. If it’s not in the cache, eBoostr reads the file into its cache so that it is much faster to read the next time it’s accessed. Don’t worry about writes, though; they are not cached, because doing so would introduce horrid unreliability in the case of a power loss or system crash.

It kept scrolling that text for about 10 minutes before finally hitting this BSOD:

So we booted a Windows Vista DVD and ran chkdsk with that to finish the job it couldn’t:

Long story short, we were trying to reformat an external hard drive and ended up putting temporary copies of the data onto the local disk. Unfortunately, the local disk went haywire at that moment, and to make a long story short, most of the files were nicely toasted. The machine needed to be reformatted as well.

Let me explain what these results are telling us before I show them. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards for Internet applications. For example, XHTML, HTML, CSS, etc. Acid 3 basically takes a lot of W3C’s newer standards and tests to be sure that the browser supports the features it should and that it behaves as it should when using them. Acid 3 is a collection of 100 different test suites to be sure that these standards are being met. So when I say that browser X gets a score of 55%, this means that browser X passed 55 of the 100 test suites.

Updated August 28, 2008. Decided it was time for an update. Outdated entries are italicized and grayed. New entries are not italicized. It’s a work in progress, and it may be a while before I have all the entries updated. It’s worth noting that Safari 4′s public beta passes Acid 3 without breaking a sweat. Safari 4.0 may well be the first release-quality browser to pass Acid 3!

Updated September 7, 2008. Added Google Chrome to the list.

Updated May 19, 2009. Decided to get up to speed with some of the browsers. Not a lot has changed, though Opera’s latest release puts it in the lead as far as officially-released browsers go. Note that I do still accept submissions/requests. This list may be really out of date now, but I’d like to bring it up to date. Any help is graciously accepted. If you submit a result, please include a summary including the operating system version, browser version, and Acid3 score as well as a screenshot of the result (mainly just as proof for browsers I can’t personally verify the results for).

Updated June 11, 2009. Safari 4.0 was released on June 9, 2009. This makes it the first official release of a browser to have 100% on ACID3.

You can use this table of results as you please, but I would appreciate if people would not just copy/paste it everywhere, because the results will outdate fairly quickly, and I would like this table to get updated more frequently. So please link back to here instead of simply copying this entire table. Thanks!

Note: Italicized lines are tests which were done a long time ago, and no longer represent the current release (beta or otherwise) of the browser.

Beta Browsers
Browser	Version	Operating System	Acid 3 Score
Safari	WebKit Nightly (r43808)	Mac OS X 10.5.7	100% (0.69s)
Opera	9.0 Beta (build 636) “WinGogi”	Windows Vista 32-bit	100% (1.31s)
Firefox	3.1b3	Mac OS X 10.5.7	93%
Seamonkey	2.0a1pre nightly (2008082800)	Mac OS X 10.5.4	85%
Google Chrome	0.2.149.29	Windows Vista 32-bit	79%
Opera	9.50 Beta (build 9864)	Windows XP Service Pack 2	79%
Camino	2.0a1pre nightly (2008082800)	Mac OS X 10.5.4	71%
Firefox	3.0b4 (20081016)	Mac OS X 10.5.2	68%
Firefox	3.0b4 (2008030714)	Windows XP Service Pack 2	68%
Firefox	3.0b4 (2008030714)	Windows Vista (32-bit)	68%
Internet Explorer	8.0.6001.18241 (Beta 2)	Windows Vista (32-bit)	21%
Internet Explorer	8.0.6001.17184 (Beta 1)	Windows Vista (32-bit)	18%
Internet Explorer	8.0.6001.17184 (Beta 1)	Windows XP Service Pack 2	18%

Released Browsers
Browser	Version	Operating System	Acid 3 Score
Safari	4.0 (5530.17)	Mac OS X 10.5.7	100% (0.51s)
Opera	9.64	Mac OS X 10.5.7	85%
Safari	3.1.2 (5525.20.1) *	Mac OS X 10.5.4	75%
Safari	3.1.2 (525.21) *	Windows Vista (32-bit)	75%
Flock	2.0.3	Mac OS X 10.5.7	71%
Firefox	3.0.10	Mac OS X 10.5.7	71%
Firefox	3.0.10	Windows 2000 SP4	71%
Konqueror	4.0.3	Linux	65%
Epiphany	2.22	Ubuntu 8.04 (beta)	59%
Camino	1.6.7	Mac OS X 10.5.7	53%
SeaMonkey	1.1.11	Mac OS X 10.5.4	53%
Epiphany	2.20.3	Gentoo Linux	51%
Konqueror	3.5.9	Gentoo Linux	51%
Opera	9.26	Windows Vista (32-bit)	46%
Safari	3.0.4 (5523.15) *	Mac OS X 10.5.2	39%
Safari	3.0.4 (523.15) *	Windows XP Service Pack 2	39%
Safari	3.0.4 (523.15) *	Windows Vista (32-bit)	39%
Mobile Safari	3.0 (420.1)	iPhone	39%
Internet Explorer	5.50.4807.2300 (SP2)	Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Multiple IE)	14%
Internet Explorer	5.50.4134.0600	Windows ME	14%
Internet Explorer	5.50.4807.2300 (SP2)	Windows 2000 Service Pack 4	13%
Internet Explorer	7.0.5730.13	Windows XP Service Pack 2	12%
Internet Explorer	7.0.6000.16609	Windows Vista (32-bit)	12%
Internet Explorer	6.0	Windows XP Service Pack 2	12%
Internet Explorer	6.0	Windows 2000 Service Pack 4	11%
* I don’t know whether Apple meant to put 5xx or 5xxx. I highly doubt that they intended to use such an inconsistent versioning scheme, but I’m going to cite here whatever they put on the About window. Thanks to Mark Rowe from Apple for explaining this: “The leading digit of the build number signifies the platform version. 45xx.y.z is Tiger (10.4), 55xx.y.z is Leopard (10.5), and 5xx.y.z is Windows.”

I guess it really comes as no surprise that Internet Explorer is currently in last place. But really, how did Internet Explorer 7 and 6 do worse than v5.5?

I’ve been working on a new benchmark for the past several weeks (would have finished it much sooner too, had it not been for college). I think the results are very much worth sharing.

The first thing to know is that the source code to the new benchmark (I’ve named it CheckMark), is one of the CrissCross library’s example programs and is available in the CrissCross source repository. It will be more easily accessible when it goes into the CrissCross v0.7.0 release (probably in a few weeks).

CheckMark has several different checksum/hashing algorithms in it: Adler-32, CRC32, MD4, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, and Tiger. Tiger and SHA-512 were written to be especially fast on 64-bit machines (they use 64-bit word sizes), and the rest are optimized for 32-bit use.

The benchmarks I’ve done are fairly simple to do. First, for consistency, it’s best to run in an environment as close to the one I used as possible. I run the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and use GCC 4.1.2. To compile and run CheckMark, you need to first get a copy of the source code using Subversion, and then once the source is downloaded, do ‘make check’ in the main folder. If your machine, compiler, and CPU pass the CrissCross test suite tests, then you can go ahead and run ‘make example’. And then to run CheckMark (assuming the build goes fine), simply ‘examples/CheckMark/checkmark’. CheckMark generates 100 1024-byte strings and times how long it takes to hash all of them 500 times. The output of the program for each hash algorithm is the number of hashes calculated per second. Since each string is 1024 bytes long though, the hashes per second number is equivalent to the number of kilobytes hashed per second.

The machines I tested with CheckMark used the following processors in 32-bit mode: ARM9 (specifically, the one used in my Nintendo DS), Intel Core Duo, Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Xeon (with a Pentium 4 core, a.k.a. NetBurst), and a PowerPC G4. I also tested the Intel Core 2 Duo in 64-bit mode to show the speed difference in 32 vs 64-bit modes.

My results are pretty intriguing, and they can be found here. Please note that in the graphs, a smaller bar is better, because the processor is accomplishing more work per clock cycle. Also note that since the graphs aren’t based on time but instead based on work per clock cycle, the clock speed of the processors doesn’t affect the graphs. In fact, the clock speed is taken into account when calculating the number of clock cycles per hash. This shows more of the raw performance of the processor and how efficient it truly is. This just goes to show yet again that clock speed is not everything!

Okay then, how are we to read these graphs? What do these results mean? Well, the most obvious thing I see when looking at the graphs is that you probably shouldn’t bother with SHA-512 or Tiger hashes unless you’re running on a 64-bit processor running in 64-bit mode. It’s also plain to see that the Core 2′s 64-bit mode very very easily outperforms its 32-bit mode when doing 64-bit math. This makes perfect sense, as the SHA-512 and Tiger algorithms make heavy use of 64-bit math. In 32-bit mode, a lot of extra work has to be done to complete a single 64-bit math operation.

Another observation I could make about these graphs is that the PowerPC just isn’t doing well at any of them, except SHA-1, where it appears to do well because the NetBurst core takes a huge performance hit. I’m fairly certain that the NetBurst’s speed issues here are due to the fact that the NetBurst core lacks a barrel shifter, the component which makes shift and rotate operations blindingly fast. There are a large number of shifts and rotates that occur in the SHA-1 algorithm, so the performance hit is understandable. Not surprisingly, the barrel shifter has returned in the Core and Core 2 architectures.

I was very impressed with how efficient the ARM9 processor was at doing these hashing algorithms. It was accomplishing so much more work per clock, even though it is a RISC processor, like the PowerPC. The only case where the ARM9 does very badly is when 64-bit math is involved.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this, as well as your own results, if you’d like me to add them to the list. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!

I figured the best place to search for new software that did what I want was to go to Download.com, find the CD/DVD burning category, and sort by user votes. I didn’t sort by number of downloads because the size of the userbase of an application doesn’t necessarily measure it’s greatness. At the top of the list was “Oront Burning Kit 2″. With an 8.83MB download size, Oront Burning Kit 2 looked tempting. It only costs $35 and does everything I need. CDs, DVD’s, DVD-DL’s, bootable discs, mp3 discs, audio discs, data discs… everything. I haven’t used it for the full 10 day trial period yet, but I’ve burned one DVD with it, and it worked beautifully. So far, I am really excited about Oront Burning Kit 2!

Now the race between Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 is on. Which will finish first, and when?

<- Part II

Welcome to part three in my series on how to survive the Windows Vista transition. Last week, I provided five steps to make Windows Vista perform faster, improve application compatibility, and potentially even save your hard drive from an early death caused by disk thrashing!

This week, I’m going to explain how to make your own Windows Vista installation DVD and eliminate features you don’t want or need. Better yet, we’ll cut the disk space usage of a Windows Vista install by a pretty sizable amount. The installation size will vary based on your decisions, but you can get the install size down to less than a third of what it is out-of-box.

Before I begin, I would like to point out a video I discovered while browsing Google News. In the video, Microsoft engineer Eric Traut demonstrates MinWin, a very minimalized version of the Windows kernel. While Eric constantly reiterates that MinWin will not be used as a product itself, he does mention that Windows Server 2008 is much more minimalistic than Windows Vista is and that MinWin will become the basis of Windows 7.This is excellent news.

Although Microsoft’s server operating systems have historically been quite minimal, it shows a new direction Microsoft may be taking. What I’m hoping they’ll do is make a client version of Windows that takes this minimalistic approach. Maybe even Windows 7, the next release of Windows, could be developed with this approach in mind. It’d be a smart direction to take, because one of the primary concerns people (including myself) have brought to light about Windows Vista is that it’s quite bloated. This minimalistic client version of Windows is something that can become a reality now, but not in a retail Windows release, at least not until Windows 7.

People have said they would pay for a version of Windows XP that’s rebuilt and stripped down. But Microsoft won’t ever do that. It’s not good business to say “Here’s Windows XP… again!” It’s possible though that a future release of Windows, branded as a new version of the operating system, could take a minimalistic design path. It’d be wonderful if Microsoft made Windows even more modular than it currently is. Removal of the Add/Remove Windows Features tool is particularly disheartening. There is good news, however, because even though Microsoft won’t be releasing a minimalistic version of Windows any time soon, you can make one yourself with a little bit of effort.

There’s a great utility called vLite which allows you to take your official Windows Vista DVD, copy the contents to your hard disk, eliminate components you don’t want, tweak a few settings to enable or disable security features and so forth, and finally burn your own customized Windows Vista installation DVD. This method is surprisingly clean, and isn’t a hack. Windows Vista’s design, like Windows XP’s, is very modular. The difference is that Windows XP had a built in utility in Add/Remove Programs that allowed you to select which components you wanted to have. Vista has removed this tool, and instead only allows you to “disable” a feature, which is merely hiding it’s existence by removing shortcuts to it. Of course, merely “disabling” a feature doesn’t free any disk space.

Once you have vLite installed, you just need to have your Windows Vista DVD handy. Put it in your drive when vLite asks where the installation files are located. Point vLite to your DVD drive (typically the path is D:\), and it will prompt you to give it a second path. The second path is where it copies the installation files to as a temporary directory. Make a directory somewhere that you can find, and then point vLite to that. Once done, click Next. I’ve uploaded the vLite configuration file I used, which has an identical configuration to what I’ve recommended below.

I’ll be touching on the Components, Tweaks, and Bootable ISO sections. So for now, just check those three only and click Next.

The first section you’ll get to deal with is the Components section. A dialog pops up when you first get to this section that asks what features you want to keep. You can check any features you really want, and then click OK. Remember that the items you check in the Components section are going to be removed, not kept. There are quite a few components that I have removed in my vLite configuration:

EDIT (2/5/2008): I have updated the vLite configuration file for vLite v1.1.1. It now cleans up a lot more than it did before, but I won’t be updating the statistics for a while.

vLite Configuration Template

• Accessories
  • Snipping Tool (0.63MB)
    If you don’t have a Tablet PC, this is not useful in any way.
  • Speech Support (451.80MB)
    Dictation software. It wastes lots of space, so don’t keep it unless you really need it.
  • Windows Sidebar and Gadgets (12.64MB)
    Not a space waster, but it sure wastes RAM when running, and it doesn’t have much practical use.
• Drivers
  • I recommend removing none of the drivers because they sometimes cannot be found elsewhere. I learned this the hard way when I removed the printer drivers only to found out that Epson hasn’t provided a Windows Vista driver for my printer because they know Vista comes with one. And if you remove it here, it’s permanent. So be careful if you remove anything here.
• Games
  • Inbox Games (95.92MB)
    Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, Hearts, FreeCell, Minesweeper, and Purble Place. Not necessary components, really, and I have never used them.
  • Premium Inbox Games (82.20MB)
    Chess Titans, Inkball… More waste-of-space games.
• Hardware Support
  • I recommend removing none of the hardware support because doing so can cause some pretty weird problems. For instance, I couldn’t figure out why my modem driver kept failing to install (even though I never use my modem, I like it when all devices have drivers loaded for them). I realized long after the fact that I’d removed modem support here.
• Languages
  • Japanese (224.71MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Korean (136.59MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Simplified Chinese (371.56MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
  • Traditional Chinese (340.72MB)
    Don’t speak it? Remove it.
• Multimedia
  • Sample Pictures (8.81MB)
    I personally find these annoying because I feel like my system is littered with files I didn’t create.
  • Windows Media Samples (130.10MB)
    Windows has quite a few multimedia samples you won’t ever use and they waste disk space.
• Network
  • MSN Installer (5.96MB)
    Don’t get this confused with a Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) installer, which you can get here anyway. Unless MSN is your internet service provider, you should probably trash this.
• Services
  • Offline Files (4.10MB)
    Caches network drive contents and WebDAV folders. It really wastes network bandwidth.
  • Remote Registry (0.21MB)
    The mere name of this one scares me. In case someone ever figures out how to exploit this, it’s probably best to disable it. Unless you’re in a corporate environment, you probably won’t use it anyway.
  • Volume Shadow Copy (5.60MB)
    If you remove System Restore as I suggest below, then I very strongly recommend you remove this. I’ve seen cases where having this service even in existence forces system restore points to be created which you can’t ever use and can only partially remove with the Disk Cleanup utility.
  • Windows Search (14.93MB)
    Indexes things on your computer to make searches faster. Unfortunately, if it hasn’t finished indexing, it won’t find what you’re looking for. Worse, if you don’t search often, the indexing provides no benefit.
• System
  • Beep (0.02MB)
    This is the driver that produces the very annoying high-pitched system beep when your sound drivers are not installed. I recommend removing it because I worry that speakers with software-only volume controls (like on laptops) will be damaged by it.
  • Natural Language (542.25MB)
    A speech to text engine. Basically allows you to talk to your computer and have it type for you. If you haven’t ever heard of this or used it, you probably don’t need it. It’ll save a massive amount of space if you don’t install this.
  • SuperFetch (1.33MB)
    This thing is such a disk thrasher. In the future, when we have hard disks with significantly lower latencies and higher rotational speeds, this may be useful. But right now, it’ll probably cause early drive death.
  • System Restore (2.74MB)
    As I’ve said before, this thing is a undercooked idea. It thrashes your hard disk backing everything up and wasting a massive amount of your disk space. I had thought the limit was 12%, as it was with XP by default, but it seems this limit has been removed and has consumed up to 26% of the hard drive space (i.e. 43GB of a 160GB drive). Worst of all, most of the time whenever you really need System Restore, it can’t help because the failure is so serious that the machine is in such a state that System Restore is inaccessible.
  • Tablet PC (391.54MB)
    If you don’t have a Tablet PC, you really don’t want this because it’ll just waste 391.54MB of space.
  • Windows Backup (9.43MB)
    Also rendered useless if System Restore is removed.
     
• TOTAL: 2,837.69MB (2.77GB)

When you add the sizes of each of these up, you can see that it really does save a lot of space. Well, we’re done on the components page. If you want to remove other things than the ones I’ve stated above, you can do so, but be sure to pay attention to the warnings that vLite gives you in the right pane. Click Next when you’re done.

The Tweaks section is quite useful. You can turn things like DEP and UAC on or off here. Whatever settings you choose will merely become the defaults, so they are reversible after you install Windows using this disc. You really shouldn’t stress over any of the settings you choose here. I highly recommend the following settings, but they’re up to you:

• AntiSpyware Realtime Protection
  Enabled. I haven’t seen any performance advantage by turning this off, and it’s generally a good idea to have good spyware defense software on.
• DEP (Data Execution Prevention)
  Enabled only for OS components (Optin). Windows components shouldn’t ever trigger a DEP violation message, and when they do, you may have a secondary problem. I’ve seen Windows Explorer crash repeatedly before, and I discovered that a trojan had tried using code injection techniques, and DEP detected it. Newer threats can avoid DEP’s detection, but it’s not a bad idea to have DEP on anyway.
• UAC (User Account Control)
  Disabled. As I said last week, it’s the root of most of the compatibility issues that people are experiencing in Windows Vista, and it’s a bad security model anyway.

On the left pane, you’ll note the Security, System, and Explorer items. We’re currently on Security, so click on System, and here are my recommendations for these options:

• Hibernation
  Default. It’s a useful feature, but if you have a lot of RAM, you may want to turn this off. Since Hibernation will basically copy the entire contents of RAM to your hard disk when you use Hibernation, it can consume a sizable amount of disk space.
• Memory requirement
  Default. If your system is so low on RAM that you need to change this, then I would suggest getting a new machine.
• Paging Executive
  Disabled (only if you have 1GB of RAM or more). As I mentioned last week, the Windows Executive can be paged to disk which makes certain operations costly. If you disable paging it, it forces it to stay in system RAM which greatly increases responsiveness.
• Power scheme
  Balanced. You can use whatever you want, but I use Balanced.

Now go to the Explorer page, by clicking Explorer in the right pane.

• Show extensions for known file types
  Yes. I highly recommend enabling this, because it’s becoming commonplace that malicious software designers will name their trojans things like readme.txt.exe. If this option’s set to ‘no’, you will merely see ‘readme.txt’ and you might think it’s a text file and then when you open it, you’ve unintentionally deployed their trojan.
• Show hidden files and folders
  No. You can enable this if you want, but it will also show things that you shouldn’t touch, like the desktop.ini files which give folders in your home directory their custom icons. So you could accidentally delete them and not be able to get them back.
• Show protected operating system files
  No. Same reason as above.

Good news. We’re almost done! Just click Apply now. vLite will ask whether you want to “Just apply the changes” or “Apply and rebuild”. I very highly recommend going with the latter option because it will actually remove the components instead of just save a configuration file for Windows Setup on the disk.

Once the process finishes, click Next, and you will be taken to the ISO section. This is where you’re given the option to create an image, burn directly to a disc, erase a rewritable disc, or write an image to disc. I recommend a direct burn unless you know what to do with an .ISO file.

Congratulations! You’ve completed the Windows Vista vLite process. You’ve now got a lean and fast Windows Vista operating system install disc.

For those interested, I gathered some post-install statistics for comparison between a non-vLite Windows Vista install and the vLite configuration used for this article:

The biggest performance and reliability gains here can’t really be measured. It’s not possible to say disk thrashing is at X% of what it was or the number of crashes/incompatibilities has been reduced by X%. However, I can say from personal experience that you’ll be satisfied in the long-term with the performance and reliability of the vLite’d Windows Vista install. I have been using this same configuration for two weeks now and have had no troubles with disk thrashing or incompatibilities.

The configuration I specified wasn’t the most stripped version of Windows Vista that we can get with vLite, it’s just a recommended starting point. I have opted to not remove certain components to retain functionality. You can indeed strip several of the Vista components I didn’t mention here and save quite a bit more, but beware that stripping certain components can severely hamper functionality.

As before, I would appreciate any feedback you can offer. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!

<- Part II

<- Part I || Part III ->

Welcome to part two. Last week I described in detail what I see as flaws in Windows Vista. This week I’m going to offer five simple solutions for some of the most critical problems. Next week, I’m going to provide a more effective and more long-term solution.

Alright, let’s begin with the most prevalent question about Windows Vista. Which version of Windows Vista should the average user buy? Choosing the version to purchase is a quite daunting process for most users. I mean, there are four versions available to consumers: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate. One would be tempted to get the Ultimate version because with a name like “Ultimate,” it seems like the others must truly pale in comparison. But in reality, home users won’t need Ultimate unless they want features like BitLocker Drive Encryption or Remote Desktop. And as I mentioned last week, Windows Ultimate Extras, a much-hyped feature of Windows Vista Ultimate, seems to be nothing more than a gimmick. There have been four Windows Ultimate Extras released to date, and I’ve found none of them useful: MUI Language Packs, Hold ‘Em Poker Game, Windows DreamScene, and BitLocker/EFS enhancements.

You can choose whatever Windows Vista edition you want, but I recommend that you save $100 by not buying Ultimate and instead get Home Premium. I would also recommend against getting Home Basic, unless you want a very stripped Windows Vista install, comparable to a very slim Windows XP Home Edition. Home Basic introduces other performance difficulties as well by not having the Aero Glass interface.

Some readers are likely surprised that I’d say Aero Glass actually improves performance. But according to my tests, this does seems to be the case. Having Aero Glass enabled not only enables hardware accelerated graphics for displaying your desktop, application windows, and so forth, but it also enables a compositioning window manager dubbed Desktop Window Manager. For those not familiar with compositioning window managers, they basically enable you to use special 3D effects on your desktop. Beryl, a compositioning manager for Linux, is famous for going hog-wild with providing dozens of plugins to enable some really crazy 3D effects. For instance, you can close a window in Gnome or KDE and instead of merely closing, it burns up in flames, smoke, and all. Many of these 3D effects are superfluous, true, but there are separate advantages to using compositioning window managers. Compositioning basically can prevent a bunch of useless work from taking place. I wrote a simple benchmark in C# for Windows Vista last week that tests how quickly windows are redrawn and moved. Two tests were run: one with Aero Glass (compositioning) enabled, one without. The test itself basically involves fifteen identical translucent (opacity scaling between 10% and 90%) windows bouncing around the screen with a black background underneath them. With Aero enabled, I got between 100 and 110 window moves per second. Without Aero enabled, the statistic dropped drastically to between 10 and 15 window moves per second. So this feature that many (including I) have outright dismissed as useless and flashy isn’t so useless after all. It will in fact improve performance for the work that most often takes place on Windows.

Tip #1: System Restore

And now it’s time to get to the meat of how to make Windows Vista a usable, small, and reliable operating system. There are five simple changes you can make in Vista that will increase speed pretty significantly. The first thing you can do is disable System Restore. If you’re not familiar with why I loathe the System Restore feature, let me explain. System Restore’s theory being that when you screw up your PC you can “roll back” to an earlier installation. Sort of an “undo” feature in the operating system. System Restore constantly, and I mean constantly, keeps backing up files. Friends of mine have complained that their computers run slowly and their hard disk is always thrashing. The reason is very simple. Every file accessed, every documented opened, every file touched gets backed up to a hidden directory. This is fine if you are dealing with letters to grandma that are a few kilobytes in size, but what about large bitmaps? Large downloads from the Internet? Yes, they get duplicated too. Your hard disk just fills up until System Restore wastes 12% of your disk space (the default percentage, anyway). The thing that makes this feature most useless is that if your computer is at a point where it actually does need a system restoration, you can’t even access the system restore feature in Windows because your system is too trashed to enable you to do so. So step one is to disable this useless feature. In Windows Vista, just click the Start button, right click Computer, and click Properties. Alternatively, hit Win+Pause on the keyboard. Once the system information window is open, click System Protection on the left. Once the dialog comes up, uncheck all the check boxes in the list and click OK.

Tip #2: Superfetch

The previous step I mentioned should save you 12% of your disk space for other uses and should offer a pretty sizable speedup. And now, on to step two. Another disk-thrashing feature that Windows Vista contains is called Superfetch. The idea behind it is that it will pre-load things that you use most often. For instance, if you run Microsoft Word on your machine very often, Superfetch will load the main executable of Microsoft Word into system RAM in case you decide to use it. This way, when you run Microsoft Word, it comes up a few seconds faster. Unfortunately, this feature is sort of unrealistic, because you may not use Microsoft Word every time you run Windows. So that file was loaded from disk for no reason. Second of all, it wastes system RAM when you’re doing tasks other than what it’s predicting you’ll do. This isn’t necessarily bad, because Windows will free this memory up if it decides something else needs it. But the worst part of all is that Superfetch will constantly thrash your hard disk. It is on a conquest to make your machine feel fast at the expense of your hard disk. If you have an especially fast hard disk, disk thrashing may not seem so bad, because disk accesses are much faster. But hard drives will die sooner if they are stressed too badly and too often. So step two is to disable this equally useless feature. To disable Superfetch, you can either download and open this registry entry file or follow these directions. Click the Start button, go to All Programs>Accessories and click Run. In the Run dialog that comes up, type regedit.exe and click OK. Now you need to browse to where Superfetch’s configuration is located. Just traverse the tree on the left in the Registry Editor window to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters. Right click on the EnableSuperfetch entry in the right pane, and click Modify…. Enter ‘0‘ in the box (without quotes, of course), and click OK. Please note that you may want to keep the Registry Editor open for step three. Once you restart Windows Vista, Superfetch will be disabled and you will shortly notice that there’s significantly less disk thrashing taking place.

Tip #3: Disable Paging of the Windows Executive

Step three is recommended for those with more than a gigabyte (1024MB) of system RAM, and this tweak can be applied on Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. Windows Vista tends to manage memory in a kind of silly manner by default. Since Vista has so many memory-intensive services and applications on a default install (as discussed last week), Vista may prioritize those programs for memory usage rather than the core of the Windows operating system, known as the Windows Executive. The Windows Executive may be paged to and from the hard disk quite frequently on a default install of Vista, and this causes a considerable slowdown when using most applications. There’s another registry entry available that makes it possible to keep the Windows Executive in system RAM all the time, and completely prevents it from being paged to the hard disk. The disadvantage is that if you don’t have enough system RAM, this can make applications that aren’t directly related to the operating system behave slower than normal. So I suggest you take this tweak on a case-by-case basis and see whether or not it helps you. As before, you can either download and open this registry entry file or follow these instructions. Open the Registry Editor as described in the second tweak above, and browse to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management. Right click on the value in the right pane titled DisablePagingExecutive and click Modify…. Enter ‘1‘ in the data field and click OK.

Tip #4: Disable User Account Control (UAC)

User Account Control (UAC) is the feature which prompts you to “Continue”/”Cancel” or “Allow/Cancel” when you open certain files or run certain programs. UAC’s purpose is to make most programs run as a regular user (non-administrator) to limit damage that a given program could do if it was malicious. If a program needs administrative permissions, then UAC can ask for permission to run the program as an administrator. That’s what all the chatty dialogs are caused by. Unfortunately, UAC is the root of most Windows Vista compatibility issues, as far as applications go. As I explained last week, the effectiveness of UAC’s security relies on the user’s ability to discern whether to allow or cancel an action. Disabling UAC can theoretically make your PC less secure, but again, the security it provides is truly dependent on the user. I personally find UAC to be very annoying, and have disabled it. I didn’t quite expect that disabling UAC would fix compatibility problems, but it worked like a charm! To disable UAC, follow these instructions. Click the Start button and then click Control Panel. Once the Control Panel comes up, click on the green User Accounts heading. Click on the User Accounts heading again (it does something different this time). You should now see the title ‘Make changes to your user account’ at the top of the white area. Click on Turn User Account Control on or off.

Tip #5: Disable Specific Windows Services

There are several Windows services that come with Windows Vista that will thrash your hard disk, and unless you make use of what they provide quite frequently, I recommend you disable them. In order to do so, click the Start button, go to All Applications>Accessories and click Run. When the Run dialog comes up, type services.msc and click OK. A quick warning before you disable some services: Windows may behave strangely if you disable certain services. So be careful disabling services I don’t say are safe to disable. To disable a service, you can simply right click on it in the list, click Properties, hit Stop (if the button is available), and then change the service from Automatic/Manual to Disabled in the drop-down list.

There are quite a few services in Windows Vista that can be disabled:

• ReadyBoost
  If you don’t have a removable flash media card or thumbdrive in your machine all the time, then you should disable this. You won’t get any of the advantages it could provide.
• Remote Registry
  Allows administrators to remotely edit your machine’s registry. This one is set to ‘Manual’ by default, but it is a potential security risk, so it’s best to disable this one.
• Superfetch
  If you’ve followed my instructions in Tip #2 above, you’ve turned Superfetch off, but that doesn’t stop the Windows service from running. Disable it.
• Tablet PC Input Service
  If you don’t have a tablet PC, this is a useless service to have running, but on a clean install, it’s enabled by default regardless of whether or not a touchscreen is installed.
• Volume Shadow Copy
  This service is similar to System Restore, in that it backs up files like mad. If you change a file, the old version isn’t overwritten, it’s copied to another hidden location in case you need it sometime in the future. This is a really expensive service to run, and it is another source of disk thrashing. I highly recommend disabling it.
• Windows Search
  Disabling this service does not make it impossible to use Windows Search. This service is merely the renamed version of the Indexing Service from Windows XP. This service will constantly scan your hard drive for files to index (catalog) to help searches finish quickly. But if you don’t search often, don’t you think you could live with a 45 second long search rather than dealing with constant disk activity with this indexing service enabled? I recommend it be disabled unless you are really bad at organization and have to search your hard drive daily.

After you finish with these tips and restart, you may realize that Windows Vista has some hope yet! There are some more drastic measures you can take to make Vista use less disk space and behave faster. I’m reserving next week’s post for the more drastic measures.

I will continue this article in part three next week.

As before, I would appreciate any feedback you can offer. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!

<- Part I || Part III ->

We have to face facts, people. Microsoft has deprecated Windows XP in favour of Windows Vista. I’ve been having difficulty coming to terms with this, largely because of what I see as major flaws in Vista. To make things worse, Windows XP will no longer be supported two years after the release date of Vista. In theory, anyway. I suspect that Microsoft will have to extend Windows XP’s life cycle because of the slow corporate adoption rate of Windows Vista, but as of this writing, it looks like XP will be unsupported by April 14, 2009.

I intend to offer some solutions to the many problems with Windows Vista, and help people survive this maddening upgrade process. But before I can provide solutions, I need to explain what problems exist. I won’t have solutions for all of them, but I do believe my solutions can overcome many of them.

Here are the issues, as I see them:

• Bloat

  Windows Vista’s default install, when compared to Windows XP, is just plain ridiculous. I mean, really, look at it. If you check disk usage, you’ll see that it consumes nearly three times as much disk space (XP takes 2.66GB on a default install, and Vista takes 7.60GB). For those of us without RAID arrays or massive hard disks (i.e. laptop users), this is just deadly. Since I’m also a software developer, my development tools take several gigabytes of space as well. This, combined with the default install size, means that I get much less disk space to work with when developing software.

  Further, the default installs take considerably different amounts of RAM to run. XP takes 43.15MB to run, Vista takes 235MB (five times as much). And that’s not including the system cache. In total, on a default install, XP consumes 207MB and Vista consumes 770MB (nearly four times as much). I realize that Vista is considerably newer, and therefore designed for a different caliber of machine, but come on. Seriously, this is ridiculous. You can’t justify taking more than a half gigabyte of RAM when just running the default install. A Windows Vista upgrade would demand much more physical RAM than people have previously needed. For Vista, running it with any less than 2GB of RAM feels very sluggish. Windows XP can be run with as little as 512MB without any slowdown. Perceptually speaking, Windows Vista demands four times as much RAM as Windows XP.

• Speed

  I am disappointed with the general performance of Windows Vista, especially relative to previous versions. Windows 2000 was lightning fast, and Windows XP was only slightly slower than 2000, but the many kernel improvements and so forth made it a worthwhile upgrade. Vista, though, is terribly slow. The UI feels generally sluggish, and it doesn’t help that Vista tends to keep prefetching things and paging to the hard disk on machines with less than 2GB of RAM.

  Windows Vista also will inexplicably thrash the hard disk periodically. It grinds and whirs for long periods of time with no explanation as to what’s going on. This disk thrashing causes a massive slowdown for most applications, especially when Windows is forced to retrieve something that’s been paged to the hard disk.

  Further, Windows Vista has become notorious for poor gaming performance. But it could have been much worse. Let me recap the history of OpenGL in Vista for those who haven’t kept up with the news. First Microsoft crippled OpenGL, which is used in roughly half of the games available today for graphics. This caused quite a disturbance in the gaming community, and justifiably so. Games with OpenGL graphics would run at half the speed. Microsoft then decided to bring OpenGL support back into Vista, likely realizing what a terrible move it was to remove support for it. But benchmarks have shown that Microsoft didn’t quite get it right. Gaming performance takes a hit on Vista.

• Compatibility

  Some software just refuses to work on Windows Vista. This one is a really widespread issue, and I would wager that any Vista user reading this has encountered compatibility problems at least once during the Vista upgrade process. Many of the compatibility problems are not rooted in the operating system itself, but rather in the security model that Vista uses.

• Security

  Windows Vista may be the “most secure operating system Microsoft has ever released” (Google this phrase, Microsoft uses it like a mantra), but “most secure” in Microsoft’s terms is not really equivalent to “secure” in everyone else’s terms. You could get a barrel of rotten apples, find the least rotten one and say that it is the “most fresh” apple in the barrel. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat or that it’s fresh. It’s just the most fresh. Vista’s security model seems wrong to me. The constant nagging for “Continue”/”Cancel” or “Allow”/”Cancel” is the wrong way to do things. Let me present a hypothetical, but not unlikely, scenario:

  A woman’s son sets up a computer for her. All she does is just basic tasks like email, word processing, and so forth. The son decides it’s best to let her work with it for a while and help her through any stumbling blocks she may encounter. Since the computer is running Windows Vista, one of the first things she encounters is the worrisome “Windows needs your permission to run this program” dialog. She is especially concerned by the note at the bottom of the dialog that says “This program can potentially harm your computer.” Her son tells her that Windows will say that quite often and to just click “Continue” or “Allow” whenever a dialog like that pops up.

  The problem in this scenario is that the dialog’s purpose is now defeated. Whenever the dialog comes up, the mother will click “Continue” or “Allow”, unable to discern whether the program is legitimate or harmful. Most end users won’t have the skill to determine what programs are safe to run or not. This basically means the security model is just useless. It basically degenerates into a chatty and annoying “feature” in Windows.

  There are better security models to use. Microsoft just needs to research to find a better one.

• Incentive

  What really is the incentive to upgrade to Windows Vista? Sure, there are a few new features, but nothing that I find myself using on a regular basis. Microsoft keeps saying that Windows Vista Ultimate is the best one to go with because of the “many advantages”. What advantages? The Windows Ultimate Extras gimmick is just a joke. There have been 3 “extras” for Ultimate in the past year, and only one of them came out after the first month of Vista’s availability (Dreamscene, another performance-killer).

Microsoft has also really failed at advertising for Windows Vista. The commercials for Vista really do pale in comparison to the commercials for XP. The features they really like to hype are things like Aero, the superfluous visual effects engine (adds the glassy window borders and gaussian blur). Aero is pretty much useless. They also hype the new TCP/IP stack. I don’t know, but this sounds to me like the programmers were proud of whatever work they did on the TCP/IP stack and said that it warranted calling it a new “feature”. Most users don’t even notice the new TCP/IP stack.

Don’t be discouraged by all of Windows Vista’s shortcomings. I intend to offer some clear solutions to many of the problems that Windows has demonstrated. However, this post has become much lengthier than I originally intended.

I will continue this article in part two next week.

I would love to hear about your own Windows Vista troubles, suggestions on how to overcome such troubles, and your opinions on what you read in this blog. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!

Part II ->