Weird obsessive urge to fiddle with the system after re-installing Windows

[Sydo]

As the title says I am kinda curious if anyone are having the same "ocd'ish?" behavior when reformatting your PC because you think it helps the performance of the syetm or whatever reason? Does the things we do actually benefit our systems are are we making things worse? All good questions!

My obsessive things after a clean install:

1. Disabling drive indexing
2. Turn off windows write cache buffer flushing
3. Removing the pagefile (Though I have just re enabled it too 16gb max usage and 3gb minimum to try and see, as i don't think it will hit performance having it enabled?)
4. Remove all metro apps (who needs that **** )
5. Disable hibernation obviously!
6. Disable Link power management
7. High perforamnce mode (power settings)

Am I just being an idiot doing most of these things?! Let's hear your urges and maybe learn something from each other

 

[EarthDog]

1. Why? That benefits hard drives. SSDs it does not matter.
2. Why?
3. Why? That can be a problem running without one. I just set a static size of 2GB with 16GB of ram+
4. Ok...you must be Windows 8?
5. Ok...
6. Why? What is that?
7. Ok...

 

[Alaric]

Weird obsessive urge to fiddle with the system after re-installing Windows

You are certainly in the right place! Track down some threads/posts by c627627. That guy is a Windows Fiddler extraordinaire.

 

[Sydo]

1. Why? That benefits hard drives. SSDs it does not matter. I don't use the search feature as I know where everything is, so my understanding of the indexing is just that it makes unnecessary writes to help find things by searching and that I don't need?
2. Why? Well, that I honestly don't know, I never have power failures, so why not?
3. Why? That can be a problem running without one. I just set a static size of 2GB with 16GB of ram+ Yeah well, it was to free up SSD space, but set it to 3gb - 16gb today
4. Ok...you must be Windows 8? Windows 10, you know all those xbox apps? all kinds of weird games? All other weather/people what have you apps that is of no use to me that Windows 10 comes bundled with
6. Why? What is that? SSD power management just idles the SSD if set to enable, i disable it to prevent hiccups when PC has been idling
7. Ok...

 

[EarthDog]

1. That's good for you... perhaps not for others.
2. But why?
3. Set it with a static value... I use 2GB min and max. It will never grow.
4. Oh, sure.. I don't bother touching them. That is a subjective thing as well.
6. Never touched it. Never saw a hiccup.

 

[Sydo]

1. That's good for you... perhaps not for others.
2. But why?
3. Set it with a static value... I use 2GB min and max. It will never grow.
4. Oh, sure.. I don't bother touching them. That is a subjective thing as well.
6. Never touched it. Never saw a hiccup.

2: No idea
3: Hmm will try put static then 2GB - 2GB Thanks for the tip!'
6: Well me neither but yeah again it's that strange thing I have Like an addiction!

 

[c627627]

I have not read what others have posted but here's what I do:


[*]Disabling drive indexing
Absolutely yes.
I actually run indexing once at install, then disable. If I don't - the hard drives are "hard" at work 24/7.
Search hits are not too slow w/o additional indexing (for me).


[*]Turn off windows write cache buffer flushing
No.


[*]Removing the pagefile (Though I have just re enabled it too 16gb max usage and 3gb minimum to try and see, as i don't think it will hit performance having it enabled?)
I experimented with this extensively.
Conclusion was to absolutely leave the page file alone.
Messing with the page file can give you headaches on so many levels.
I even had programs be affected in the past, negatively, as in, they didn't work any more.



[*]Remove all metro apps (who needs that **** )
Classic Shell means you never ever see Metro, unless you SHIFT+Click on the Start Menu.
Also, the real Administrator account can't run Windows apps.
So I never see them or metro but I would take this step to free space if needed and if significant amounts of space would be freed.


[*]Disable hibernation obviously!
Yes.


[*]Disable Link power management
What does that accomplish, I'd like to know.


[*]High performance mode (power settings)
I manually set this up on every install.
Settings > System > Power & sleep > When plugged in, turn off the display after 3 hours.
When plugged in, PC goes to sleep after Never.

Additional power settings > Change when the computer sleeps > Click on Change advanced power settings in blue below >
Hard disk > Turn off hard disk after > Setting: 0 Minutes, which when applied would turn to Never > Apply > OK > Save changes

 

[Kenrou]

Caught this in a Anandtech forum about windows write-cache buffer flushing, had search about it a while back :

"In the dialog where you set that, if you have caching enabled, the option to disable buffer flushing is below it, and off by default. I also turn write caching on for drives I use regularly, as the speedup is substantial on USB 2.0.
In a non-journaled file system, the update to the data and metadata need to occur simultaneously. Of course they can't, so a barrier is used to hep make sure that the changes are all done before it goes on to other writes. If a new write occurs to a file, but its metadata isn't updated, you have corruption. Likewise, the reverse. Writes don't have to have strict ordering, but metadata and data need to be synchronized. What buffer flushing does is tell the drive to write out all its data, because we know that, except for most SSDs, drives lie, and actually do write caching, even if you tell them not to (this is part of why SSD makers have often made it a big deal that they buffer, but not cache, writes).
In a journaled file system, the same thing is still true, except that it understands that the linked file contents and its metadata don't ever reach the platter at the same time, and shouldn't be expected to. What if the journal is cleared, or a recent write marked as completed, but some of the file data or metadata haven't made it to the platter yet? You have a situation where corruption occurred because new data got written before data that should have come before it. With just one file's data, this is simple and easy. But let's say there are 5 files in the middle of being written, and their current status is stored to the disk in different orders and amounts, per file. You want to do that when possible for performance, and let NCQ/TCQ work its magic, but every so many of them, the FS driver is going to want to stop and make sure it all got put correctly on the disk.

So the process is a cycle of:
1. Assume good state.
2. Write stuff in whatever order the disk controller, or the disk itself, thinks is best, for optimal performance.
3. Decide that now would be a good time to finalize those writes, matching together all the data and metadata.
4. Write out the final metadata, and that the file system is in a clean transactional state (an assumption, w/o a journal or log file system), and change the in-memory file system state to match.
5. Repeat.

Somewhere between starting 3 and completing 4, buffer flushing should be going on. As long as it gets done properly before going back to 1, anything that screwed up between 1 and 4 can be recovered from, as all of the writes after 1 can be assumed to be bad, and only allowed to stay if they can be verified as good, while all writes before 1 can be assumed to have even correct."


M$ explanation : "Many disk devices provide enhanced performance through the use of an onboard cache, which provides read-ahead caching for data that is being read from the disk, and write-behind caching (or delayed writes or "lazy" writes) for data that is being written to disk. In some cases, it is important for data to be written to the physical disk immediately, and not retained in the disk's onboard write cache to be written later during an otherwise idle moment. This prevents loss or corruption of this data if the disk or controller (wherever the write cache is implemented) suddenly loses power."

 

[Sydo]

[*]Disable Link power management
What does that accomplish, I'd like to know.

"Link Power Management (LPM) is a power-saving technique that helps the SATA device save power. The SATA link to the device is set to low power during idle time when there is no I/O activity or devices are absent or unused. LPM automatically sets the SATA link back to an active power state once I/O requests are queued to that link when there is work to be done."

"Power savings introduced by LPM come at potential expense of increased disk latency. Enable LPM knowing the system could experience increased duration of idle I/O time. The increased duration is dependent upon the specific storage device being used since not all devices respond the same to LPM."

I did a little SSD benching last night with buffer flushing enabled and disabled, but as expected the results fluctuate a lot. Later I will do 5 benches with each setting (enabled, disabled) And post screens of results. To see if it actually makes things worse or better. Keep in mind that it heavily depends on the SSD(s) used.

 

[Sydo]

Okay so did 5 SSD benches with each setting for write-cache buffer fluffing

With it Disabled: (Disabled means check mark in the box)


With it Enabled: (Enabled means no check mark in box)


So what's your thoughts? Does it make a difference?

 

[EarthDog]

I don't see one. That said, the more you bench an ssd, the worse performamce you will get before it TRIMs itself. I more proper test would be to force TRIM between runs (or better yet, format it... but that isn't possible here). In the end this doesn't show much.

Really, the only tweaks I do are the page file. I leave everything else alone.

 

[Kenrou]

There is a program called Cacheman from Outertech that used to work wonders for disk cache (and other system settings) in the good old days of 95/98/Vista/XP but as soon as SSD became widely available it completely lost its interest (to me anyway). Might be of interest for people who still use older/slower spinners as boot drives.

http://www.outertech.com/en/speed-up-windows-7-vista-xp

 

[Sydo]

I don't see one. That said, the more you bench an ssd, the worse performamce you will get before it TRIMs itself. I more proper test would be to force TRIM between runs (or better yet, format it... but that isn't possible here). In the end this doesn't show much.

Really, the only tweaks I do are the page file. I leave everything else alone.

Ah, wish I had know about trimming between each test, oh well just gonna leave it at what I normally have, can't be bothered to do it all again