Saturday, August 9, 2008

Disk management in Vista(hacks)

Miscellaneous Hacks

Next up are a few hacks I've come across in my travels. The first is for systems that have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with a reliable battery attached. If your system is equipped with a serial-ATA (SATA) hard drive, go to Device Manager (the quickest way to do that is to click Start and punch in "Device Manager" and hit Enter). Expand the Disk Drives entry. Right-click on your SATA hard drive and click Properties. Click the Policies tab, and click Enable Advanced Performance. This option enables extremely aggressive write caching, which can speed up drive access but also cause you to lose data if the power goes out suddenly.

Enable Advanced Performance
Enable Advanced Performance on your SATA hard drives for speedier access.
A couple of tweaks require you to hack the registry. To do this, click the Start button, type regedit and hit Enter.
Note: You should make a backup of the registry before you alter it. Click File, click Export, and in the resulting window, make sure All is selected at the bottom. Give the file a name and click Save. This will create a full backup of your Windows registry; if you accidentally hose something, you can go into Windows Safe Mode and restore it. Alternately, you can create a Restore Point before you alter the registry; go to Control Panel, then System and Maintenance, and then System. Click System Protection in the Tasks list. Click the Create... button, and follow the prompts.
I recommend two registry hacks for minor performance gains. First, turn off the low disk space checks:

  1. Using the left side of the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
  2. Right-click in the right pane and select New Key.
  3. Name the new key Explorer.
  4. In the Explorer key, right-click in the right pane and click New DWORD (32-bit) Vaue.
  5. Name the DWORD NoLowDiskSpaceChecks.
  6. Right-click the new DWORD and click Modify.
  7. Set the Value Data to 1.
  8. Click OK.
This will prevent Windows Vista from checking the space on your hard drive and popping up the notorious "Hey, you're running out of space!" warning balloon.
Next, you can probably safely disable the NTFS habit of creating 8.3 versions of filenames for backward compatibility. DOS is dead, right?
Open the Registry Editor and:

  1. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
  2. Find the DWORD called NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation.
  3. Right-click it and click Modify.
  4. Change the value to 1.
  5. Click OK.
You should reboot after you alter the registry. These tweaks mildly speed up hard drive access by removing needless overhead.



Defrag Once in a While

If you've somehow gotten the impression that Windows Vista doesn't need to be defragged, think again. Vista comes with a defrag program (Microsoft's worst yet, in terms of usability) and it even comes preconfigured to defrag the hard drive once each week. Unless you keep your computer on 24 hours a day, launch Disk Defragmenter (click Start and type in "defrag" and hit Enter) and disable its scheduler. You can do this on your own, with a better defrag application which, unlike Microsoft's, still shows you a map of the drive as it defrags.

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