Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Start Applications Faster

One of the things we spend most of our time doing at a PC is waiting for applications to start. Larger applications, particularly, can take what seems like an eternity-OK, 5 to 10 seconds on a fast PC-before they're ready to use. And small programs, even though they load quickly, don't always "pop" on screen as quickly as one would like.

Windows has a lot to do when it loads a program. It has to suck the program file data off your hard disk, something that a clean, optimized drive will handle more quickly (discussed later in this tutorial). It also has to make room in your PC's system memory (RAM) for the program, which means your virtual memory settings (see the section "Optimize Virtual Memory and Cache Settings" later in this tutorial) play a significant part, and, of course, more RAM definitely helps.

And then there's the program itself, which must read through all your fonts (the fewer the better), load its own add-on components (DLLs, plug-ins, etc.), and allocate its own section of your hard disk to store temporary files.

But there's also something else at work here, something that isn't strictly necessary. Windows 7 includes an "Application Compatibility" system that checks each program you run against a database of known issues, and warns you if there's a potential problem. This takes time and resources, and is really only useful when you're installing or running older programs not specifically designed for Windows 7.

Once you've set up your PC and tested it with most of the software you'll be using on a daily basis, you really don't need the Application Compatibility system any more. Turn it off, and that's one less thing Windows needs to do each and every time you start a program.

If you're using the Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition of Windows 7, open the Start menu, type gpedit.msc into the Search box, and press Enter to open the Group Policy Object Editor (gpedit.msc isn't available in Home Premium). Expand the branches to Local Computer Policy → Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Application Compatibility. In the Application Compatibility section, double-click the following settings to configure them:

Turn Off Program Compatibility Engine.
Set this to Enabled to turn off the system that checks each program you run, and allow programs to start more quickly.
The downside is that some of the User Account Control (UAC) features.

Turn Off Program Compatibility Assistant.
The Assistant is the window that pops up after you install a program or use it for the first time to inform you that it may not have run correctly. Obviously, this is something you're probably able to determine for yourself, so set this option to Enabled to get rid of these prompts.

Remove Program Compatibility Property Page.
This gets rid of the Compatibility tab in a program's Properties window. If you're setting the other options here to Enabled, you might as well set this to Enabled, too.

When you're done, close the Group Policy Object Editor and restart Windows for the change to take effect. If one of your programs stops working, you'll need to come back here to re-enable the Application Compatibility engine. See the sidebar "Keeping an Eye on Prefetch" in this tutorial for another feature that can affect application startup times.

ReadyBoost: Why Not?

Got an extra USB flash drive or digital camera memory card laying around? If you have a slower hard disk, you may be able to improve startup time and overall disk performance by letting Windows use your card to cache its Prefetch files.

Setup is easy. Just right-click the drive in Windows Explorer, select Properties, and then choose the ReadyBoost tab. Select Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost to use the entire drive, or Use this device to use only part of the drive. (If selecting the former option, make sure there's nothing on the drive you care about.) Click OK when you're done; the change takes effect immediately.

Now, it's true that a typical flash drive is significantly slower than a hard disk, so how can ReadyBoost help? The idea is to give Windows a place off-disk to store a few cache files so it doesn't have to interrupt your hard disk during heavy activity to access them. Although you probably won't notice any difference with a fast hard disk on a desktop PC, laptop hard disks are notoriously slow, and have the most to gain from ReadyBoost.

The long and the short of it is that ReadyBoost is free, and super-easy to test. And if you need the USB port or memory card slot, you can pull out the flash drive at any time with no ill-effects.

Want to keep ReadyBoost, but don't like Windows Explorer showing a drive you can't use? If you assign a drive letter to your ReadyBoost drive, and it isn't used by any other removable device, you can hide the drive in Explorer with a simple registry hack. Open the Registry Editor and expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVer sion\Policies\Explorer. Double-click the NoDrives value, or if it's not there, open the Edit menu, select New and then DWORD (32-bit) Value to create a value by that name. Select the Decimal option, and in the Value data field, type a binary value representing the drive you want to hide, where A: is 1, B: is 2, C: is 4, D: is 8, and so on. For instance, to hide drive U:, you'd type 1048576 here. (To hide more than one drive, just add up the numbers and type the sum into the Value data field.) The change takes effect when you log out and log back in.