Windows® 7 Tweaks: A Comprehensive Guide on Customizing, Increasing Performance, and Securing Microsoft® Windows 7

Chapter 15. Optimizing Core Windows Components

The core Windows components can be thought of as the steel structure of a skyscraper. This basic structure of the building provides support for all the other components. Windows 7 has various layers of components that support each other and at the lowest level interacts directly with the hardware. This chapter helps you tweak the core components of Windows to increase the overall performance of your computer. Instead of a steel beam structure, Windows 7's core components are short-term memory (RAM, a.k.a. volatile memory), long-term storage (your hard drive, a.k.a. non-volatile memory), and the CPU. All the programs that run on Windows, including Windows itself, eventually break down to these three core components.

To get started, you are going to tweak your system's short-term memory using some techniques and features of Windows 7 to increase the speed of memory operations. Then you will tweak another critical component, the paging system, and finally speed up your hard drive and adjust how your CPU works.

Windows Loves RAM

Microsoft made a lot of improvements in Windows 7 to reduce the memory utilization compared to the notorious memory hog Windows Vista. This has helped significantly, especially on Netbooks, but Windows still performs the best when the computer has sufficient memory. I already covered trimming the fat from Windows 7 by disabling components and services that you do not need to use. This helps, but on some computers it ...