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/hardlinks...kshellext.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.