My Vista Tweaks…or “How to Set up Vista as a Virtualization Host”

Sure, Windows 7 is coming soon (we hope!), but you are using Vista NOW, and you want to get the most out of it.

First, Here are some links to some online guides that have already been created that you can read over. I really suggest reading through these, and deciding what will work best for you, and your usage, however I will explain some of the tweaks I use, and why. I will also explain why I wouldn’t recommend some of my tweaks to the average user.

So, first things first, here are the guides I have personally read and gathered information from:

TweakHound.com: Tweaking Windows Vista

BlackViper.com: Windows Vista Super Tweaks

BlackViper.com: Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Service Configurations

Keith Combs’ Blahg: Favorite Vista Runtime Improvements

Now, for what I do to “set up” my personal Vista machine:

A few notes on “my” setup:

I will reiterate that I would *not* recommend my particular setup for most people, in fact there are several security related settings I change that really do not recommend for most people, but I set up my machine for pure performance, and I want my machine to perform optimally as a Virtual Machine host. While not a server, I spend a great deal of time in Virtual Machines, and optimize my system for peak performance in that scenario. That being said, this also makes for a nice “gaming” setup as well.

First, well after loading drivers and updates and such, I customize my Start Menu. These aren’t performance tweaks, but I consider them absolutely necessary, and I simply cannot use a machine for an extended amount of time without these settings changes.

Right-click the “Start Orb” and choose “Properties” from the pop up menu. In the resulting window, click “Customize”:

Next you will see this window:

You will find many options in the scroll list, but here are some changes that I make:

1. Control Panel: Display as menu
2. Uncheck “Default Programs”, “Help”, “Highlight newly installed programs” and “Use large icons
3. Check “Run command”
4. System administrative tools: “Display on the All Program menu and the Start menu”

I also change the “Number of recent programs to display to 9 (since I use Small Icons), and I pin my commonly used applications to the top of the start menu under the “Internet” Link. I also un-check “E-mail link” since I use Gmail.com at home…at work I have that checked with Outlook as my option. The “biggies” for me however are having Control Panel as a menu and the “Run” command showing on the start menu. I don’t use Vista’s “search” (as you will find out later), but I use a run dialog box extensively.

Next, I disable UAC (using the MSCONFIG method). To use the MSCONFIG method, simply hold down the “Win” key and the “R” key to bring up the “Run” dialog box (or if you used my Start Menu tweaks click Start –> Run), type “msconfig” (no quotes) and click “Ok”.

Now, in the MSCONFIG window, choose the “Tools” tab. Scroll down to, and highlight the option “Disable UAC (Requires Reboot)”, click Ok and reboot your machine now.

Note: This is one of those tweaks that I do not recommend for the average user. In fact, I tried to like UAC – even after I decided that I couldn’t like UAC, I tried to use it anyway, however, all such attempts failed miserably for whatever reason. I do think the logic behind UAC is very sound, and having a strong Linux/Unix background I agree with the ideology of it 100%. In Vista however, it was simply poorly implemented. I have found UAC to be much improved, and very non-intrusive in the builds of Windows 7 I have tried, and I will likely keep it enabled once I migrate to Windows 7 full time.

After disabling UAC, I disable Windows Defender. To do this, open Windows Defender, and go under “Tools” and “Options” and uncheck EVERYTHING.

Reboot again.

Next I’ll disable Security Center, because I don’t want Vista nagging me and telling me how un-secure my machine now is, so first you have to stop security notifications. To do this, first open up Security Center, and in the left-hand pane of the Security Center window, click the link “Change the way Security Center Notifies Me”:

After completing this step, click Start –> Run (or Windows Key + R) to bring up the run dialog once again, and type ‘services.msc’ & click ‘Ok’:

Now, you will have the “Services” Management Console open, and we can actually disable Security Center here.

Once this window is open, scroll down the list and find the Security Center Service:

Double-click the entry and in the resulting window, use the drop down list to select “Disabled” and you can go ahead and click “Stop” and then “Ok”:

Now, after Security Center is disabled, we can disable some other services. Here are some other services I disable:

• Diagnostic Policy Service
• Distributed Link Tracking Client
• IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules
• Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
• IP Helper
• IPsec Policy Agent
• KtmRm for Distributed Transaction Coordinator
• Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service
• Offline Files
• Portable Device Enumerator Service
• ReadyBoost
• Remote Registry
• Routing and Remote Access
• Secondary Logon
• Security Center
• SSDP Discovery
• Superfetch
• Tablet PC Input Service
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
• Terminal Services
• UPnP Device Host
• Windows Defender
• Windows Error Reporting Service
• Windows Firewall
• Windows Search

I do want to stress that disabling several of these services also disables functionality that the average – or in fact most users would want. For most of these services, you can check the BlackViper.com services guide linked at the top of this article for a full description of the service, and what it does, but there are a few I will specifically mention here:

ReadyBoost is a system service that will allow you to use a USB flash drive (provided it is fast enough) to speed up your system. It is *not* a replacement for “real” RAM, in reality it’s more of an augmentation of the system page file. However, once you cross the 4GB mark of “real” system RAM the point of diminishing returns kicks in, and by the time you get to 8GB of RAM (as I have in my system), it almost becomes counter-productive.

SuperFetch is a really awesome service for most people. What it does, is keep track of applications and files that you usually run and keeps them cached in your unused system RAM. Although it caches the files and programs in RAM, if you launch another larger program, it will drop those caches and free the RAM up instantly, and re-cache them a low I/O priority once RAM frees up again. My reasoning for disabling is two-fold. First, I just hate the constant disk access on my machine. My 10K RPM C:\ drive is very “chattery”, and the sound of the constant disk access drives me batty. Secondly, when you work a lot with Virtual Machines, it just tends to cache the VirtualHard drive images, as it sees them as “frequently accessed files”, and this simply causes it to not cache files and programs that would actually be useful in cache like it would for a “normal” user. Having a very fast C:\ drive helps when having this disabled, as fewer applications will be in your cache, so if you have a “slow” hard drive in your system, program launches will feel and seem slower.

Windows Search is another service that is potentially useful to the average user, but like SuperFetch tends to suck up a lot of I/O bandwidth (although at a very low priority) and causes a lot of “disk chatter”. Also, I tend to be very organized with my files on my PC (unlike anything else in my life), and  I don’t lose stuff. I also don’t use the “Start Search”  feature of the Vista start menu either – I simply use the “Run” dialog. Old habits die hard. Disabling this will also disable the search features in Outlook as well. Also, please note that disabling this, and then installing some other file indexer like Google Desktop for example will simply be counter-productive from the disk access & disk I/O perspective.

Next, please see Page 9 of Eric Vaughan’s TweakHound.com Vista Tweak Guide for some great advice around networking. Personally, I use is “Networked, Sharing *No other Vista Machines (or Networked Xboxes) option.

Then, pop over to Page 10 of the same guide and follow his advice for “Clean, Defrag and Optimize”, and also his “Cool Tools” page.

There you have it – this is pretty much how I set up my personal home Vista PC – this configuration works well for both Virtualization and Gaming workloads, and hopefully you can find some of this advice helpful. Again, please don’t take my word for all of this, and don’t necessarily follow my guide to the letter. Do as I did and read the links I provided at the top of the article and create your own personal setup guide based on the great information provided in those articles. I provided my example in hopes there was someone with a similar workload that would benefit from the information, and to show how you could use information from multiple sources to get optimal results.

Good luck and happy tweaking!

Also, I definitely want  to give special thanks to Eric Vaughan, Keith Combs and Charles Sparks (aka Black Viper) for all of the hard and excellent work they put into creating and maintaining their own tweak guides. Also, please note that TweakHound and BlackViper have excellent Windows XP guides as well, and Eric has some excellent Linux guides up on TweakHound as well.