Windows 7 Performance tweaks

Windows 7 is my favorite operating system of all time. I still remember when Vista came out, i had the chance to try it out and immediately realized, it's not for me. It was slow, the HDD was constantly working at it's peak so i decided to stick with Windows XP. Quite the opposite happened when Windows 7 came out and now i know that i will never have to look back at Windows XP, just because 7 is so good. But today, we are not talking about that. Sometimes i have to work with very slow PC's and i have to make them faster just so i can finish a job in time so let's look at some ways to tweak a Win 7 for performance.

Disabling the search indexing feature - even though the revamped search function can do wonders compared to Windows XP, you might not need it that often. If you don't, you can disable the search indexing feature of Windows 7. It will increase your PC's performance, but lower the speed of searching. If that sounds something that you would like to do, here is how:

• Right-click the "Computer" icon on the desktop or in the Start Menu and select “Manage”
• Double-click "Services and Applications" in the "Computer Management" window
• Click “Services”

• Browse the list of services until you find "Windows Search"
• Right click it, select "Properties"
• In the new window, change "Startup type" to "Disabled" and click OK and we are done

Disable Aero on Windows 7 - the Aero theme adds really good visual effects, but it uses a lot of system resources to do that. If you are used to the Aero theme, you can just try this tweak and if you don't like it, switch back.

• Right-click your Desktop and select "Personalize" and click on "Window Color"
  

• In the new window uncheck the box saying "Enable Transparency" and click OK
  

Most of my backgrounds were black or dark and in the window where we removed the transparency, i selected the Slate (grey) color and moved the color intensity slider all the way to the right and now i don't see a big difference between using transparency or not. Disabling more visual effects - Aero is just one of the many visual effects that you can disable. There are a lot more effects that you can disable. If you want only performance and if you don't care that your operating system looks like Windows 98, you can use this tweak:

• Right-click on "Computer" and select "Properties"
• on the left side, click on the "Advanced systems menu""
• Select the "Advanced" tab and under "Performance" select "Settings"

That will open the "Performance Options tab" where you can add and remove visual effects.

You can select "Adjust for best performance" and if you don't like the looks of your Windows 7, you can just select some effects to get them back. I suggest you to experiment with this option until you find your balance between performance and looks.

Disabling services that you don't use - there are a lot of services in the Windows operating system that a daily user does not need. You can disable a lot of them to increase Windows performance, for a list of services that you can disable safely, go here.