Vista is trying to kill my poor laptop

Wells wrote:

Just finished installing (took over 4 hours) and there are 52 processes running... Vista is trying to index my harddrive AND defrag it at the same time... wtf? My harddrive is just grinding constantly. Clicking on "Adjust indexing options" in the Performance window doesn't do anything.

I also just stopped over 15 services - most of them were completely unneccessary just like with XP - why do they have the tablet pc service on by default when this isn't a tablet? And IPSec, I doubt many home users will use it by default so why is it on? I thought this stuff was going to be fixed?

And why is there a destop.ini file on my desktop that is impossible to remove even with the Administrator account?

You get the tablet input service because you might plug a USB digitizer into your PC and the tablet services would come alive then.

Yeah, I know.  We went around and around about this one.


Here's the bottom line: How much memory did you REALLY gain by stopping those services?  Measure before and after.  You'll save 1 thread (which is about 20K of pagable memory), but for the majority of those "unnecessary" services, that's really just about all you'll save - services are quite lightweight when in a shared svchost instance (and all built-in services in Vista are required to be in a shared svchost, with some exceptions (search comes to mind immediately)).

My laptop (a Dell Latitude C640 with 512M of RAM) runs Vista Ultimate edition reasonably well.  I stop the search engine but that's about all I do to tweak the machine.  I am fairly obsessive about memory consumption on Vista (I've filed many bugs about memory consumption and processes that are running that shouldn't).

One thing to realize is that Vista DOES take more memory than previous versions.  DWM (Glass) is a big culprit, it maintains an image of each window contents using 32bits/pixel, that means that big windows will take up many megabytes of working set.

Search chews up VM, but it's actually a polite citizen, it's working set (that's what REALLY counts) is quite reasonable.

What's your laptop's configuration?  If you run "perfmon /mon", how many hard faults/second are you seeing?  That's a much better indicator of whether or not your machine is overtaxed.

Try disabling glass - that can free up a lot of memory (at a loss of some seriously cool eye candy).