Installed Vista x64 - advice on making it faster

[Hachoo]

Ok so I've been using XP 32bit for ages... I finally decided to upgrade my memory past my 3GB limit to 6GB. Installed Vista x64 last night which took most of the night. Btw using windows update with windows vista is the slowest f'ing thing I've ever done, even compared to XP which was no flash either.

So anyway, everything is all updated now and tonight I will be tweaking the performance some (since it is very much obviously lacking compared to XP). Plans as of right now:

Turn off all file indexing
disable services that I don't need running
Already moved my page file to a separate hard drive

Aero isn't on, what else can I do to increase the performance and decrease the resources used? One thing I noticed in Vista I didn't see in XP is when I go to my display properties it says my video card has 512MB of memory and access to 2GB of shared system memory. Is there a way to disable the shared system memory completely? I don't want my video card using any more than the 512MB it has access to.

Also, I plan on redoing all the WoW tweaks I had done before like symlinking my directories (although in XP I was using winbolic link and I know Vista can do it natively, I just have no idea how), and making the latency registry tweak, etc.

So, any advice on reducing vista resources and/or increasing performance would be great, thanks!

[Fuzzyboy]

I'd be interested in this also. I can, however, tell you how to do symbolic links :-)

mklink /D <where you want the link> <where you are linking from> ie. mklink /D d:\WoW\Tank\Data d:\WoW\Generic\Data

[Coltimar]

I just re-installed Vista x64 and XP x64 and two systems to get ready to 10 box. I found this somewhat helpful http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/70563-boot-up.html.

[Coltimar]

Also, I use http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html for making my symlinks easier.

[bugilt]

I heard windows 7 runs games better than all the past windows OSes.

[gitcho]

"Reliability and Performance Monitor." You need to use it. It will tell you where your system is slow.

I 5box one 1 machine running vista x64 (core i7 920 with 640gb HD, 6gb RAM, asus 4850 w/ 512mb ram). It ran fine (60fps) with 6gb of RAM, but I was dropping some frames in shat, so I ran the reliability and performance monitor for an hour. The report it generated told me that i had a lot of memory hard faults (pc requests data from memory that has been paged to disk), and recommended either adding more memory, or reducing the demand on system memory. I decided to add another 6GB (12GB total now) to fix it, but it wasn't necessary (i run vm's & other). Obviously not everyone is going to want to throw money at the problem, but the built in pefrmon tools in vista will tell you where the system slowdown is, and what you can do to fix it.

For vista only:
1. open reliability and performance monitor
2. expand "Data Collector Sets" -> "User defined"
3. right-click "user defined" folder and choose "new" -> "Data collector set"
4. call it "wow" and choose "create from a template"
5. choose "system peformance" from the list and choose "finish"
6. right click on the new user defined data collecter set you created called "wow" and choose properties
7. under the "stop condition" tab, set an overall duration of 30 minutes and click "OK"
8. right click on the "wow" collector set again and choose start

In wow, go about your business as you normally would (dont just stay in one place, go in & out of cities etc, instances etc.). When the 30 minutes is up, it will compile a report that will be visible under "reports" at the bottom in the left pane. It will tell you where the bottlenecks are and give you recommendations on how to fix them.

I've run the last 3 months with 5 separate complete copies of the wow directory (d:\games\wow1, d:\games\wow2 etc.) and only recently created directory junctions (don't simply create a symbolic link, you should create a directory junction) on wow2-wow5 back to the data folder in d:\games\wow1. The report was showing me a high number of disk reads and a moderate disk queue length on the common.mpq and expansion.mpq files in each directory.

I created renamed the Data folder in d:\games\WOW2 - d:\games\WOW5 and created a junction with "mklink /J d:\games\WOW2\Data d:\games\WOW1\data". I haven't run with this configuration for long enough to report if there is any benefits, but it doesn't appear to make a huge difference initially - the game still has to read from the file 5 times, but vista my handle cacheing more intelligently with all reads pointing to only 1 file.

Like i said, i 5boxed on 6GB of ram on a 24" lcd @ 1920x1200 with max detail and it would only drop frames in the major cities. It was smooth everywhere else (granted, my i7 920 is a very nice processor). Unless your processor is slow, you should not be having to turn off all kinds of features in vista to get acceptable performance. Run the performance monitor and it will tell you what`s up.

Hope that helps.

*EDIT*
forgot to mention that my 640GB HD has 32MB cache, which was a major jump in disk performance from my old drive with only 8mb of cache.
I also set processor affinity for all my instances of wow with hotkeynet.

[Catamer]

you have 6g so I can't believe you had to turn off areo.

I run several copies of wow and don't need to turn stuff off.
I set my video settings for performance and turn off the fade-in junk but still.
maybe you need a faster video card.

and limiting the video card to 512M instead of using some of that left over memory will probably only slow down your system instead of speed it up.
Just because the video card can use that much memory doesn't mean it is.

[Catamer]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?

[heffner]

I went from 4 independent wow directories to Symlinked ones. The difference was really noticeable whenever a zone was loaded. For example, I was waiting forever on boats when I landed at my destination. Not at all now. I don't think I noticed any other improvements.

Cheers.

[BobGnarly]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?Because you almost always want different graphics settings, sound off, different mods, etc between your main and the slaves. So you run two directories (one for the main, another for all the slaves) and symlink the data directory to help the OS and hard disk caches.

I have also started symlinking a few files in the wow directories since it tends to confuse itself after patches, but that's not really necessary.

[Bloodcloud]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?I run WoW from two folders WOW1 and WOW2 (data dir is junction)
I run my mains and solo mode I run from WOW1 and my slaves I run from WOW2

In both game-dirs I junctioned the accounts together so I share there the Saved variables.

Even before multiboxing I had My accounts Junctioned to share the data dir because of the Saved variables. So I could see restedXP friendslist, Characterinventory...accross my accounts.

Nowadays I have a housekeeping batchfile which copies AH-scan data from WOW1 to WOW2 and I only do certain actions on WOW1 (e.g. scanning AH)

[FunkStar]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?Because you almost always want different graphics settings, sound off, different mods, etc between your main and the slaves. So you run two directories (one for the main, another for all the slaves) and symlink the data directory to help the OS and hard disk caches.

I have also started symlinking a few files in the wow directories since it tends to confuse itself after patches, but that's not really necessary.

I wonder though, what the fastest would be.
At the moment I have:

2x 1 TB spinpoints in raid0
2x 750GB Spinpoints without raid (was planning on making them a second raid0)

My main wow folder is on the raid0 of 2TB
I was planning to make the 2x750 gb a raid0 as well and put my 2nd wow folder on there, so I run my main from the first raid0 and my 2 alts fromt he 2nd raid0.

Would this give better or worse performance than running them all symlinked from the first raid? (aka 2 wow folders on the first raid0 that shara data map)

My choices atm basically are:
1. Main on First Raid0, Both alts on 2nd Raid0 out of the same map (since they dont need separate config files)
2. Main on First Raid0, First alt on 1 750disk nonraid, second alt on the other 750 disk nonraid
3. Main on first Raid0, Alts also on first Raid0 but a different map, sharing data map symlinked

I have 0 experience with symlinking, so I really can't 'compare' them myself.

Thanks!

[Zakalwe]

For a start you can remove any of the excess rubbish that Windows in general likes to have sitting around by navigating to: Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.
Remove the things that you won't need for your PC, like tablet PC and windows meeting space etc.

I usually turn off all the eye candy on gaming PC's since i personally can't stand all that crap. Right click Computer > Advanced under performance click settings. Choose "adjust for best performance" then apply. Then go "custom" and turn on these 3: smooth edges of screen fonts, use drop shadows for icon labels and use visual styles on windows and buttons. Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!

I'd also recommend getting a good commercial defrag program and defragging a few times once you have your initial setup done. Ones like http://www.diskeeper.com/ , http://www.oo-software.com/ or http://www.raxco.com/

Do a thorough disk cleanup. Click start type "cmd" (no quotes) in the search box, hit enter. At the command prompt type (without quotes): "cleanmgr /sageset:1" hit enter. In the disk cleanup settings click all of them then ok. Then at the command promp type (without quotes): "cleanmgr". Choose the drive, click ok. Choose what you want to remove then ok.

Get a good registry cleaner, the one mentioned in that Vista tweak forum seems alright. Also optimize the registry with NTREGOPT found here: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

You can also use crapcleaner to give it an even more thorough cleaning: http://www.ccleaner.com/

JV Power Tools is also pretty rad for doing some optimization: http://www.macecraft.com/

phew....that should make it fly!! 8)

[Hachoo]

Hehe, I've already done most of that. I've been a Sr. System Admin for ~11 years now (although the last 2 was ONLY dealing with Unix which is why I haven't used Vista before) so I know all the tricks that apply to "all" windows. So far vista feels faster with all the changes I've made, still slower than XP but not by much.

Couldn't test out 5 boxing last night because I'm waiting on keyclone to reregister my system key so hopefully tonight I'll be able to try :)

Only correction on the above post is that you'd actually want the page file to be at the end of the drive if you want it to be faster. Physics. Drive spins 7200 RPM, which portion of the drive is actually moving fastest? (Hint: its not the inside, its the outside) ;) This is the same reason when you burn a CD or DVD, and watch the burn speed, it slowly increases the further you get into the disc, because the outside of the disc is moving faster than the inside.

[tushygalore]

http://www.vlite.net/ anybody use this?

[BobGnarly]

why does everyone sym-link multiple copies of wow?

I've only put one copy of wow on my pc and run all of my accounts from it.
Is this for some special key binding? Aren't the key bindings by account anyway?Because you almost always want different graphics settings, sound off, different mods, etc between your main and the slaves. So you run two directories (one for the main, another for all the slaves) and symlink the data directory to help the OS and hard disk caches.

I have also started symlinking a few files in the wow directories since it tends to confuse itself after patches, but that's not really necessary.

I wonder though, what the fastest would be.
At the moment I have:

2x 1 TB spinpoints in raid0
2x 750GB Spinpoints without raid (was planning on making them a second raid0)

My main wow folder is on the raid0 of 2TB
I was planning to make the 2x750 gb a raid0 as well and put my 2nd wow folder on there, so I run my main from the first raid0 and my 2 alts fromt he 2nd raid0.

Would this give better or worse performance than running them all symlinked from the first raid? (aka 2 wow folders on the first raid0 that shara data map)

My choices atm basically are:
1. Main on First Raid0, Both alts on 2nd Raid0 out of the same map (since they dont need separate config files)
2. Main on First Raid0, First alt on 1 750disk nonraid, second alt on the other 750 disk nonraid
3. Main on first Raid0, Alts also on first Raid0 but a different map, sharing data map symlinked

I have 0 experience with symlinking, so I really can't 'compare' them myself.

Thanks!I obviously haven't run your exact setup, so I can't say for sure what will work best for you but I'll tell you what I tried.

First on raid. I'm not a big fan of the built-in raid controllers because they aren't hardware controllers. They use your CPU to manage the raid partitions which means that not only is it going to be slower, but it's going to consume CPU resource that could otherwise be used elsewhere. I tried raid0 with two 10k raptors and was not impressed at all with the improvement. So, I wound up just un-striping them and using them as two separate drives (mainly so that I wouldn't have to worry about losing everything if anything went wrong). YMMV, just sharing my experiences.

After I decoupled my raid configuration, I first had two directories both on the same drive. I was curious if spreading it across two drives would help, so I tried it it. It didn't, in fact it slowed it down pretty dramatically. My speculation is that by moving it across two disks, you are bypassing any disk caching (first time you load file A from client 1 it will be in cache on the disk so it would be faster to load it for subsequent accesses). So for me, having it all on one disk proved to be a faster solution.

From there, I found that symlinking all the data of wow sped it up quite a bit when loading and whatnot. I believe this is because when a file is symlinked the OS knows it's the same and can cache in memory after the first load. This made a huge improvement for me on loading or zoning.

My last effort was to put all the symlinked data on an SSD drive. You don't want everything on SSD, but having the stuff that is mostly just read (not written, except during patches - not very often) definitely helped as well.

So basically, what I wound up with is multiple directories all on one disk, with the "read only" data symlinked to a separate SSD drive. This configuration works really well, especially if combined with Vista and a healthy amount of RAM (for caching). I can load my 5 toons up almost as fast as a single one.

Hope that helps.

[Hachoo]

Well I started 5 boxing in Vista today. With 6GB of RAM my hard drive bottleneck is pretty much gone. I can run around Dalaran now with 5 toons and my HD light stops after 30 seconds and never flashes again.

Unfortunately, it just brought me up to another bottleneck - the CPU. So now if I leave task manager open while I'm in Dalaran, both cores on my CPU are pegged at 100% the entire time. I'm sure this is also affecting my max FPS when solo boxing too, as I have a GF9800GT and I never get more than 62FPS even on a single client.

So the question is, what would be better for 5 boxing:

Quad core 2.5GHz
or
Dual Core 3.4GHz

Opinions wanted, thanks!

[emesis]

Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!


Windows does not require a paging file. I have mine turned off entirely on my gaming PC, I do NOT want any use of virtual memory. I have 8gb on a 5-box machine, BTW.

[Bloodcloud]

I think all you ever wanted to know about vista tuning is here : TweakGuides ('http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html')

[Hachoo]

Whilst you're in the performance options click the Advanced tab and under Virtual Memory click change. Click "no paging file" > set then reboot. Once it has rebooted go back into this option and set it manually. This puts the paging file at the start of the disk which makes accessing it faster. Make the initial and maximum sizes the same. If you have more than 4Gb PHYSICAL memory set it to 512Mb. DO NOT SET IT TO 0, WINDOWS NEEDS A VALUE HERE!!


Windows does not require a paging file. I have mine turned off entirely on my gaming PC, I do NOT want any use of virtual memory. I have 8gb on a 5-box machine, BTW.Believe it or not you will actually take a performance hit having no page file at all. Google for it ,but you don't really need a large one, just 512MB will be fine. Not having one can cause the OS to take extra time doing a few operations and will actually slow the system down slightly. If you have a lot of memory and a small page file it will only get used to speed up a couple operations it is needed for.

So, in short, set a 512MB page file at least.