This isn’t what I want to be writing about. But a recent discovery compels me to do so. So, I’ve decided to make this an experiment, and beg your apologies that this will not have much technical merit despite the title.

After the last post, Set the Priority of a Process By Name Automatically, in Vista (which probably could have been named a lot better), I discovered that the post had made its way to some other sites. These sites appear to pull content from all over the web, package it up as their own, and toss ads all over it. One is lucky if the site even references the original author or links back to the original location of the post. It’s frustrating, to say the least. I’m all for distribution of knowledge and the like, but that’s taking it too far. Maybe I shouldn’t feel this way, but I (like others) put brain sweat and time into the work I do, and it would be nice if the source of the information would at least be cited if they’re going to republish it without the author’s consent.

So I visited two of these sites (which I have

…

The other day I was playing around with the Image File Execution Options and Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, in Vista. I saw an interesting query take place. Using notepad.exe as an example, I saw a query for a key called “PerfOptions” in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\notepad.exe] when I ran notepad. The result was NAME NOT FOUND, so I decided to rectify that. After adding a key named “PerfOptions”, I ran notepad again. In Process Monitor, I saw queries for four values:

• IoPriority
• PagePriority
• CpuPriorityClass
• WorkingSetLimitInKB

Because of recent explorations with process priorities*, CpuPriorityClass grabbed me right away. Looking at the SetPriorityClass function, one can see the different values for the dwPriorityClass parameter. I created a REG_DWORD named CpuPriorityClass in PerfOptions, and set the value to 0×80 in the hopes that notepad would launch with “HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS”. Instead, it launched with a priority of NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS (8) - the setting had not made any impact. Then, I set the value to 8 and launched notepad. Notepad launched with a priority of 8. I changed the value to 4, and that had no impact. I changed the value to 0 - no impact. I tried 10 - no impact. I couldn’t see any

…

Windows Vista has around 130 services. True, not all of them are running, but most are set to default to run when necessary. Over half of them start up on a default machine. Your first step towards tweaking vista should be to disable services that you frankly have no need for. They are just running aimlessly.

There are two options here. You can manually go through all 129 services with the aid of our In-depth guide to help you determine if you might need a service (dependencies and what depends on a given service are listed), or you can run one of our custom Registry files which will allow you to try out several tweaked settings. Don’t worry, if you mess up your services, or you don’t like the results of the tweaked settings, you can always go back to the default settings with one of the handy default reg files on the same page. (more…)

aimlessly, computer boot, computer load, default settings, priority, registry files, reg files, tweaked, tweaking, vista, Windows