Bruce Atkinson

Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category

Even though my desktop has been heavily upgraded over the years, my XP system partition hasn’t changed since it was first installed. I have never re-installed XP. I was tri-booting XP, Vista, and Ubuntu. Spending most of my time in XP. A couple of things made me decide to finally pull the plug and start clean. I pulled my 3 drives from my system and put them in USB enclosures. I then installed a single 320 gig HD. I decided to go with Vista and not install XP.

My system is an Athlon XP 3200 with 1.5 gig of ram. I’m holding off on upgrading my system a little longer because my next upgrade is going to involve me having to buy a PCI Express video card. I’m perfectly happy with my BFG AGP card. My system has always been responsive in XP but with Vista it seems like a dog. On the other hand my laptop with a Core 2 Duo cpu and 2 Gig of ram seems to run Vista just fine most of the time. Even so it still has it’s random performance hiccups.

With determination to get Vista performing well on my system, I started my long ordeal of installing software. First up was Visual Studio 6. I needed to install VB 6. Microsoft should be ashamed with how they have treated their developers. You would think that Vista would support all of MS’s developer tools right out of the box. When you install VS 6 on Vista you get a message to get online help. All you get is saying that C++ has incompatibilities and to contact Microsoft. I can live with just VB 6 out of VS 6, but it seems that there are problems with installing the VS Service Packs. I was able to get SP 6 and install it without too many problems.

Most people would say don’t install VB 6, but I still use it and need to, because MS did such a terrible job on creating VB .NET as the next version of VB. They should have used a completely different name for the product and just said that they were abandoning VB. It is not worth the effort to convert existing VB 6 apps to VB .NET.

You would think that VS 2005 would be just fine on Vista, but it isn’t. You get the same dialogs warning about it’s incompatibilities. This wouldn’t bother me so much except for two things. The time it takes to install and the problems during the install. There are service packs available, but you can’t put them on until you have installed VS 2005. The install for VS 2005 takes a long time. The VS help portion wouldn’t install because I had moved my documents folder to a network drive. I had to figure that out, move my documents folder back locally, install VS Help, and then move it back to the network drive. The informative error message was “invalid drive f:\”. I couldn’t find someone with a similar problem so I had to figure it out.

I thought that Visual Studio and MSDN took way too long to install. I have 1.5 gig of ram and a 2 gig USB using ReadyBoost. I didn’t see any improvement using ReadyBoost. I actually thought the system was slower. I noticed while installing that Vista was always starved for memory as the SuperFetch consistently seemed to fill my memory with stuff I wasn’t using and didn’t leave any room for the stuff that I was loading.

I then installed the Service Packs, the first was taking forever to get to the point where it actually would start installing. I noticed on the web page that I was launching it from, that it said if you have UAC enabled that it could take an hour of more while it verified all the certificates. I had been trying to see if I could live with UAC and I decided right then that I couldn’t. I turned off UAC and retried the service pack for VS2005. It still took a long time but was much faster than with UAC on. The VS service pack update for Vista also took a long time.

It took so long to install Office 97, Office 2003, Office 2007, Visual Studio 6, and VS 2005 I was starting to wish that I had just installed XP. I then started testing out my system in this configuration. I didn’t like how it responded. It seemed sluggish compared to my system running XP on a badly thrashed system disk. I started looking at my memory usage and you can’t really tell what your memory usage is. I knew from XP that my max memory consumption was right at 1.5 Gig. I had no idea what my memory was in Vista, but I could tell that the SuperFetch was randomly accessing my hard disk at times that I really didn’t want it to.

I did some research and found some comparisons that showed slower performance using ReadyBoost. It seems that ReadyBoost is really designed to decrease the performance hit of a memory starved system and not really something to improve performance. Circuit City had a sale on memory so I opted to upgrade my system to 3 Gig. I knew I would need it to keep Vista and Flight Simulator X happy.

Knowing I had enough memory I removed my ReadyBoost USB drive and booted up. I didn’t do anything after rebooting. I just watched my memory consumption and I noticed that my system’s memory crept up to the point that I had hardly any free. I have several different usage profiles and I prefer that what is in my cache is stuff that I’m currently working on and that I have plenty of free memory available when I start to do something that I haven’t done before or rarely do. I started looking around for performance tips for Vista and I saw a tip on turning SuperFetch off. I was looking for ways to tune it, but off sounded good to me.

I turned SuperFetch off and rebooted my computer. The first thing that I noticed was that my system was more responsive without ReadyBoost and SuperFetch. I tried a few things and then checked out my memory consumption. After about 30 minutes of using my computer I still had 2 Gig free. Some people will say that is 2 gig wasted. I know that it isn’t. It actually is sitting there ready and waiting for me to use it when I need it. It will then be immediately available without Vista having to find a home for or throw away all the crap that SuperFetch has stuck in my memory.

I believe for some scenarios SuperFetch makes sense. The way that I use my computer it doesn’t at all. If MS decides to give me the option of tuning it by identifying applications to cache, excluding applications from the cache, and the ability to set the size of my free memory pool then I would turn it back on.

I have been using my freshly upgraded system for about 2 hours, with no noticeably hiccups in performance. In the two hours, I haven’t had one need to go to task manager to see what was making my system slow. I still have 1.9 gig free. I’m anxious to try my laptop without SuperFetch. I believe that the reason that my laptop has never felt as sluggish in Vista as my desktop is because of the dual core cpu.