This article was supposed to be about streamlining Vista. My goal was to poke through the
registry, service list, control panel and computer management panel to find,
document and tweak anything that would make Vista run a little bit better and then benchmark 3D programs on a streamlined
copy of Vista against XP. However, I’ve been thwarted. Games wouldn’t run, applications wouldn’t install, and a slew of Vista
options could not be disabled even if it would’ve helped the PC’s performance
or my sanity; it all just went to hell.

I do not have a slouch of a computer, and the following hardware yielded a 5.6 out of 6.0 on the Windows Experience Index:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 running at E6750 speeds (a “safe” speed, as opposed to the 3GHz+ I usually run it at)
• 2GB OCZ PC-8000 Platinum (at 1000MHz DDR)
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
• Asus P5B-Deluxe

The peripherals are all SATA DVD burners and disks, eliminating the need for any legacy hardware controllers. Essentially, it’s a very fast and ultra-modern PC. Again, it’s no slouch, and it had no trouble running the pretty parts of Vista, nor does it have issues running any game I’ve tossed at it when I run XP. Running those games on Vista, on the other hand, was like trying to turn the sky purple.

Where did my troubles begin?

Installation

Partitions

The average user’s system won’t have multiple operating system partitions. Despite this, any serious OS shouldn’t have an issue supporting it. Unfortunately, that seemed like a tall order for Vista.

My computer’s storage consists of a single Western Digital 320GB SATA-II hard drive with three partitions:

• Partition 0 (C:\) - Windows XP, 5GB (Flagged as a primary partition)
• Partition 1 (D:\) - Storage, 278GB (Flagged as an extended partition)
• Partition 2 (E:\) - Windows Vista, 15GB (Flagged now as a primary partition)

Prior to this article, E:\ was simply a blank and unformatted section of disk
space that I kept for experiments such as this or my secret and short-lived
affair with Ubuntu Linux. Suffice it to say, installing Windows Vista on my
hard drive required me to format the partition to do anything else. That’s where
the trouble began. Upon formatting the 15GB free space that Windows Vista would
go to, the Vista installer tossed up a BSOD that was so brief I couldn’t make
heads or tails of it.

Naturally, when you’re performing any hard disk operations
and Windows gives you a blue screen, you begin to worry. I ran a full suite
of diagnostic utilities, including Hitachi DFT and Memtest, on my PC (which is
less than six months old), just to make sure that nothing was at the point of
failure. It wasn’t. Therefore, the blue screen had to do with the Vista installer.
Booting back from the Vista disc, Vista had indeed carved out the 15GB I had
requested, but it also saw fit to randomly swap partition types of C:\ and D:\.

Partition 1 was now flagged as the primary boot partition, and Partition 0 was
now flagged as an extended partition. This means that the BOOT.INI file nestled
in C:\ referred to a primary partition that no longer existed, and boot files
that were no longer valid because there was no master boot record on that partition
to access. Windows Vista had rendered my Windows XP installation unbootable,
and made it so the next installation of Windows to Partition 0 would drop all
the boot files into Partition 1 where they should not be.

Because I backed up daily, I could rest easy when I reformatted Partition
0 to install XP again. This installation of Windows XP had one purpose, and
that was to give me time to install Acronis
Disk Director to fix Vista’s shenanigans with my partition table.

The installation
of XP went smoothly, of course, and Disk Director gave me the ability to flag
all the partitions as the proper type. While I was in that copy of Windows,
I deleted all the files off of partition 1 that should not have been there:
ntldr, ntdetect.com, pagefile.sys and boot.ini. Booting back off the Windows
XP disc revealed a partition map that was correct: Part0 was finally C:\ again,
and Part1 was D:\. I put the second installation of XP in four hours on my drive,
got it patched and up to snuff, and went back to Windows Vista.

Drivers

The SATA-II drive I’m using
prefers the SATA controller be run in AHCI mode to provide optimal disk performance, hot-plug functionality, power management
features and more. The choice is presented in the BIOS: Run it in IDE-emulated
mode, which is easy at the expense of drive throughput, or run it in AHCI mode
which is is more feature-complete, but requires you to load drivers from a flash
drive in the Vista installation. I decided that I would load my flash drive
with the AHCI SATA drivers from Intel, using the newest AHCI driver package
for the Intel P965 Express chipset. I made sure I snagged the right ones: Windows
Vista Ultimate 32bit drivers.

I restarted the Windows installer and told it
to load drivers from USB so I could continue installation, but Windows Vista
would not accept the first set of drivers I downloaded. Redownloading the package
and copying the same files to the flash drive again yielded drivers
Windows Vista accepted, but Vista reported that it could not verify the SATA
controller as being capable of dual-booting, so the installation could not continue.
Eventually, I had to relent and change the hard drive back to IDE-emulated mode,
losing all the benefits of my SATA-II drive in Windows Vista. A later registry
hack allowed me to enable this feature, but this feature should have worked
the first time, in the Windows installer.

Installer

At this point, the Windows Vista installer took off running, and provided a
pretty fast and prompt-free installation experience. It’s nice that Microsoft
has cleaned up the intimidating text-mode setup featured in NT, 2000 and XP in
favor of a full GUI for the entire process; it makes it easier for everyone
(Not to mention faster) to click your way through the entire ordeal. The last
stage of installation has Windows Vista benchmarking your hardware to determine
if your system is capable of running Aero
Glass and the Windows Sidebar. Prior to this section, you have to configure
your user account. You supply the name, the password, the user icon and so forth,
and Vista immediately logs these changes into the OS.

Proceeding to the benchmark
section means your user account has been created, and if the benchmark crashes,
you must start over and supply a new user account that you will not use because
one has already been made. The benchmark crashed two of three times I attempted
to run it, and that means I had the user account that I really wanted (The one
I specified the first time), and two more accounts that I would later have to
delete because they were worthless to me. Finally, however, the installation
finished and dropped me at the Vista desktop with Aero enabled.

Streamlining Windows Vista

While we were ultimately unable to test the results of our streamlining process,
we did manage to document all the changes we made to the operating system to
reduce the memory footprint by nearly 200MB on a fresh boot,
as well as reducing the page file impact from 607MB to 368MB, both of which
are considerable physical and virtual memory savings.

The biggest sin of Vista’s
bloat comes in the form of 125 system services, a large majority of which come
enabled on a fresh installation, which would explain why a fresh boot of Vista
after installation had 532MB or 26% of my available memory taken just to run
itself. The minor issues come in the form of the sheer processor overhead required
to maintain these services, and the Windows Sidebar which took up to 40MB of
RAM to run the default gadgets.

Streamlining Ultimate Vista’s Services

The goal of this section is to describe what each and every service
in Windows Vista does, and what you should do with that service either to increase
performance, or to maintain features you wish to use on your PC. Pay close attention
to services that are flagged with (n) notations, as these control parts of Windows
I may have found pointless, but you may find very important to your daily workflow.
The startup type column is the most important, and that’s where you tell Windows
Vista what to do with the service when the OS first loads. To change the startup
type, access the service list by hitting WINDOWS LOGO+R on your keyboard, then
typing services.msc and hitting enter.

This process list assumes
several things:

1. You have a hardware firewall, such as a router, or use a software firewall such as ZoneAlarm, Black Ice Defender or Commodo Personal Firewall.
2. You’ve disabled the auto-run feature of Windows Defender by double-clicking
   its icon on the system tray, have gone to the tools button, and disabled all
   the options for automatic scanning. Failing to do so will yield errors when
   Windows starts.
3. You are not connected to a domain of any kind and that you are not employing
   group policies.
4. You do not use a dialup connection and have a router if multiple computers
   need access to the internet.
5. You have atleast 1GB of RAM.
6. You perform your own system backups either by file (such as Cobian
   Backup) or via a hard drive image (such as Acronis
   True Image).
7. You do not use a smartcard of any kind to authenticate on a PC, network,
   or domain.

(1) If you like having a convenient list of PCs
and printers accessible on the network when you go to the “My network”
icon in Windows, leave this service enabled.
(2) You can save considerable memory resources by disabling Aero, but if you’re
like me and find it rather pretty, you might leave this enabled.
(3) If you’re the kind of person that has shortcuts for programs or folders
on other PCs on your desktop or in your start menu, leave this service enabled.
(4) If you intend to fax from Vista, naturally you would leave this enabled.
(5) Do you stream media from your PC to your XBOX? If so, leave this service
enabled.
(6) If you’re specifically aware you need IPv6 support (And you will be if you
do), enable this service and set it to automatic.
(7) This facilitates #1, and is a good idea to leave enabled if you want these
things.
(8) If you’re a parent and want to restrict computer time, web access or game
access of your kids, you should leave this service enabled and consult the Parental
Controls feature in the Windows Control panel
(9) If you’re an unlucky soul that must synch your MP3 player through Windows
Media Player, this service needs to remain enabled and set to maual.
(10) If you share files or printers from any computer on your network, leave
this set to automatic.
(11) If you’re the kind of person that likes typing \\PCNAME\ in a Windows Explorer
window to access a PC on the LAN instead of \\XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX\, you might want
to leave this service enabled for convenience.
(12) If you use a digital camera or scanner and want Windows to automatically
grab and handle pictures from these devices, leave this set to manual.
(13) If you plan to use your PC as an HTPC or a Media Center streaming server,
leave these services set to automatic.

The last step of this process is to close the Windows Sidebar,
and disable it from starting up again by right clicking the icon in the system
tray and telling it to bugger off permanently.

Following these procedures reduced my system from 42 Processes,
607MB paged and 532MB of RAM used to a lowly 29 processes, 368MB paged and 400MB
memory usage. You can see how careful management of Windows’ bloat can significantly
reduce the amount of system resources Windows gobbles up. Further disabling
the Aero interface (An action not everyone enjoys) clipped an additional 40MB
from the page file and took the memory footprint to 18% or 368MB of RAM. Not
bad.

Benchmarking Streamlined Windows Vista Against Windows
XP

This is where things go south.
I planned to compare XP with a tamed Vista, to see what (if any) performance
enhancements were gained by hacking at Vista until it was marginally tolerable.
I’m sorry to report this was probably the most hellish experience
I’ve had with a Windows PC since I mucked about with a KX133 and a Socket A
Athlon Thunderbird in 2000. FRAPS was to be used to record the framerates of
two minutes of standardized, repeatable gaming, and then enumerate the low/high/average
FPS between XP and Vista. Below is a list of games I attempted to run, and the
results thereof:

• Supreme Commander: Would not run, referenced a D3Dx9_31.DLL error. Even
  when this file was placed in the SYSTEM32 directory, the game failed to run.
• Half-Life 2: When HL2 wasn’t spontaneously crashing with no error messages,
  FRAPS was crashing 30 seconds into the recording process with an unhandled
  exception error. The PC had to be restarted to get HL2 to run again, and the
  crash left behind three processes consuming 400MB of RAM that served no purpose.
• Quake 4: In the opening FMV, when the USS Patton comes out of superluminal
  travel, the camera pans towards the planet and crashes every time. The crash
  also butchered the gamma/contrast/saturation settings of Vista until the PC
  was rebooted.
• World of Warcraft: One of the few games I tested on Windows Vista successfully,
  XP and Vista’s benchmarks were within a 2% margin of error, and thus I can
  happily report that WoW has no change between XP and Vista.
  Good!
• Unreal Tournament 2004: Like World of Warcraft, the framerates were within
  the margin of error, and thusly there is no change between
  XP and Vista.
• Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion: While the introductory sequences and game option
  menus worked capably, loading into the world crashed the game approximately
  45 seconds into play with no errors.

Resetting the services back to their default values failed to
change the outcome of the performance on any of these games. I
intended this section to be the real bread and butter of this article:
charts, comparisons and breakdowns of video card settings. Instead, Vista had a different
plan for me; this section became the footnote to a story of utter disaster.

Where does Windows Vista go from here?

At the present time, it goes nowhere. Windows Vista is a product exhibiting
nothing but wheel-spinning in my eyes. I’ve disliked the thought of Windows
Vista since it was released for testing to MSDN and TechNet, but I gave this
retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate a thorough trial with an open mind. I ran Vista for a solid three weeks as my primary operating system,
using all the games and applications I would normally use on Windows XP, and
received nothing but trouble for my efforts.

For instance, Winamp relies on Windows
to report sound configurations: How many speakers? What type of soundcard? What
quality can this soundcard support? Windows Vista feeds information to Winamp
that can not be used on Windows XP, therefore when attempting to play audio
on a copy of Winamp configured for Vista inside XP, no audio is produced. The
only solution was to install a separate copy of Winamp just for Vista.

I had a single copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 installed on the D:\ partition (storage) referenced
at the beginning of this article. Configuring licensing information inside XP
rendered CS2 unable to run in Vista, and vice versa was true. I assume this
is an Adobe issue, but this type of annoying software/driver issue is exceedingly
common on Windows Vista and suggests just how coldly Vista was received amongst
driver and software developers. Things like this are just the tip of the iceberg,
with both NVIDIA and ATI scrambling to produce drivers that are of even passable
quality due to the excessive difficulty in writing video drivers for Windows
Vista. Printer manufacturers are shrugging, promising support for only a tiny
fraction of their products by mid-summer. Makers of national wireless cards,
such as Cingular and Sprint, have one or two supported cards in Windows Vista,
at the very best. Many of these cards may never be supported.

At the end of the day, nobody can say I didn’t give Vista an honest try. I
used it day in and day out, throwing objective tests at it that could prove
once and for all that Vista was a more capable operating system, most of which
it failed miserably. And what, for the pricetag, does Windows Vista really offer?
Potential? How do you place a pricetag on that, and how do you validate the
pricetag that a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate carries? Most of the exciting
features of the operating system can be emulated on XP. The control panel files
can be copied into an XP installation and ran. Aero Glass is already emulated
by the boys over at Stardock.
The drivers on XP are vastly more stable and mature, but more importantly, programs
run correctly.

The simple fact that an operating system was in development for five years
and displays this level of inadequacy for a “Retail-ready” release
speaks volumes for the quality of the product. Forget streamlining Vista, let’s
get it working correctly first. Service Pack 1, anybody?

Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Windows