I have been a bit frustrated on the performance of my super bad, 64 bit quad processor, 3.2 GHz, 8 GIG RAM, and 4 Terabytes of Storage, WIN 7 Ultimate. Pretty hot hardware specs and better than almost everything else made today. Re-built about 3 or 4 years ago after a lighting strike, I can’t make her any better today except add more processor cores and maybe a bit faster GPU video card. But almost nothing I run could take advantage of them.
So what’s the problem? Well, it actually was the WIN 7 operating system. It’s bad-ass too, better than WIN 8 on this kind of system and I tested WIN 8 myself. I was experiencing very slow start ups and just generally sluggish performance. I thought I was smarter than Microsoft so through the years I had shut off various built in protection features like Windows Defender, WIN firewall, etc.. I have a network firewall so why did I need another firewall on the computer in my private network?
I swear those “tweaks” I made at first never had any ill effect on computer speed. But of course the OS is always getting updated, sometimes several times in a week. So who knows what gets changed… certainly not information available to mere mortal systems owners.
Awhile ago a message starting popping up on my screen at cold boot telling me certain system communications “features” were turned off and that I should read the logs and fix the proclaimed problem. Primarily the message said outside services were unable to communicate with my system. Well, that was fine with me. I planned it that way. I simply ignored the message as a typical WIN OS nuisance. All my programs were running OK (I assumed).
But as my system got more and more “boggy” I figured I better investigate this warning and see if it was involved with the slow down. Buried in an infinite amount system help files I discovered that modifying things like Firewall and Windows Defender (WD) and various reporting systems was a serious no-no and Windows would get even with me for messing with Mother Nature. WIN 7 contains known (but not to me until then) system slowdown “features.” The OS was saying, “Do it my way or the slow way.”
Ok crud, I thought. I guess I better play along with the “creator’s” Master Plan. I set WIN 7 within as many of my tweaks I could remember, back to system specifications and followed all the rules like blink my screen to black if the op system “thinks” the software I am about to purposely run may not be properly registered. Grr…
But holy smokes batman! My computer has suddenly turned back into a screaming demon fast bad-ass again. I’d forgotten how fast it could be. Applications “pop” open again and all is well in Mudville. It could be just various caches working again but I am impressed.
Lesson learned: It’s not nice to fool (too much) with the Mother Nature in your Windows OS.