SairesArt, could you tell more about this, please?
Ehh, why not, just delivered an application update, might as well type out all of the fun :D
Let's dig in:
Microsoft's recent fad is programming on their new app framework. The only way to delete those is by inputing commands into powershell.exe (not cmd). These include, but are not limited to (all out of my head): bingweather, bingnews , windowsstore, "people", bingsports, which power the windows tiles and phone home to get info.
Then there is the unholy grail: Cortana. It taps into Window's search index and constantly phones home for god knows what. You need a tool to get rid of it, a powershell command is not enough. Be aware, that if you do this, you effectively kill the windows start search. You cannot replace it with the old windows 7/8.1 search bar.
All of these apps either fully load on start and you cannot disable them by killing services, or preload, which happens outside of the window's prefetch, like bingweather to phone home and get weather updates. It ain't much, but for people looking for max performance (and privacy) these have to go to.
Telemetry is the service (also DiagTrack.exe), that collects OS data and keeps the info. Whether it keeps the data or sends it off to Microsoft is dependant on the system's setting, but it always collects data regardless and provides no benefit to the user. This can be removed aswell.
Windows defender ain't bad actually, it serves the purpose. But as a programmer, no matter what antivirus I have, sooner or later by using tools or writing code of my own, either heuristic or the standard search always catches on and makes my life hell. It is a definite performance eater and never in my life have I been saved or helped by anti virus software. I always check stuff on virustotal.com if I don't trust dlls or executables, which is more accurate anyways, since it scans across all known anti virus' software.
No antivirus software can save you against rootkits anyways. If you use a thirdparty one, deleting it is actually better than letting it be disabled, since then windows won't update that service. An antivirus is essential if you can't guarantee yourself or an employee not doing stupid stuff. (My father had his HDD encrypted, for accidentally clicking allow script run on a Music sheet pdf, no antivirus helped there either :| )
Search index... nom noms a bit of HDD space and requires a dedicated service to run, called "windows search". If you kill it and unindex all your files, it won't actually break windows' search bar in the explorer, it will still work, but it will rescan the directory you search in, making system wide searches unusably slow.
But windows search ignores half the goddamn system. As a programmer it kills me, that it ignores system dlls.
Just use god damn
Everything, it quickly writes an index of EVERY single file that exists and the search is ultra fast. Within a millisecond you have found your file, no matter how many harddrives, no matter how many files. Also sort by type is the best implementation out there.
Disabling windows update service, not just disabling, but also blocking it from running as a service is the real kicker. No more interruptions, no more random home-phoning. Need to update? Just do it manually every other month and you are good. This kills me as a customer if it is left on. I never had any unwanted delays or "pls wait for windows.... bla bla" It also limits HDD fragmentation. (will touch on later)
Superfetch and prefetch... is a great system, that preloads the first couple percent of often used programs, but this does increase start times a touch, not much, and fills out ram with stuff you use often. This is great on laptops. On fast, well defragmented HDDs and especially SSDs it can lead to absolute moron behavior of the OS. If you fill out your ram with, let's say Corona, it sometimes purges the prefetched data and sometimes starts paging it, dependant on the OS's algorithms, which are impossible to know. Now, if it starts paging, you get your read speed cut in half, while it loads in for instance a scene file and offloads the prefetched data. Then, if you look into the prefetch folder you see sometimes absolute nonsense files being prefetched. It is being quickly sorted out, but it is sometimes random in what it picks and what it considers "used often". So you get a bit of junk loaded aswell, to not much benefit in the first place if you have fast storage. Also it makes some people freak out, as it seems they have no RAM left.
A laptop with 4gbs of ram is often capped at 90% RAM, although if you add up the memory from the taskmanager, it comes no where near as close. This is prefetcher reserving ram. Again, a bit scratching from performance.
You can disable superfetch ( service ) and the prefetch subsystem by editing the registry. For powerusers, an inivisible system at best and a tripwire at worst.
Fix sizing pagefile is to limit fragmentation, make it generously big and if possible, put it on a second harddrive, so if windows accesses it, it doesnt slow down other read/write operations.
Disable window's scheduled defragmentation.
Now, the interplay with proper defragmentation: You can shortstroke a hardrive, since at the other edge the read and write speeds are faster. And you can use a not stupid defragmentation program like Auslogic's DiskDefrag, which has an optional "put system files at Harddrive beginning" algorithm, which takes forever to do the first time, but puts the most important stuff at the outer ring of the disk. So the first time setup for me is: Install and update windows, disable page file, reboot, push all systemfiles and generally all files to the outer ring, renable page file. This will put the page file on top aswell and not cut it in half. If you leave pagefile on auto, it will resize, slice, move it around so godamn often, that window's defrag won't keep up with the amount of HDD rattering it induces. One manual god damn defrag and every HDD runs fast, doesn't frustrate with slow copies, moves and Firefox startups and keeps the user happy.
This keeps everything running fast for me for years and I don't feel the urge to upgrade to SSDs as bad as other people. Everything starts up as fast, as on the first day of a windows install. I can't complain.
