Hands On: Boosting mobile performance

With a few tweaks, you can hugely increase Vista’s performance on your laptop

Superfetch and Readyboost are the Jekyll and Hyde of Vista’s features; on the positive side, they can accelerate application performance, but both have an evil side that forces you to endure heavy disk activity as your system starts up, during which time it’s effectively rendered unusable.

This is frustrating enough on a desktop system as you start the day, but it can drive you to distraction if you want to squeeze in a bit of work on a laptop while you’re, say, waiting for a train or a colleague to arrive.

In this month’s Hardware column we’ll look at the various things you can do to improve the speed and handling of a Vista laptop ­ and the common culprits may not be as guilty as you’d think.

The test system
Our test subject was a Sony Vaio TZ150N: an ultraportable laptop sporting an Intel U7500 1.06GHz Core2Duo processor, 1GB of Ram and a 100GB hard disk with Windows Vista Business pre-installed. The Vaio TZ150N is a smart-looking laptop and a great form factor for portability, but its default configuration results in lousy performance.

Much of the criticism has been down to Vista, with Sony now offering a full set of Windows XP drivers online for anyone wishing to ‘downgrade’. But that’s almost too easy. Before pulling the plug on Vista, we wanted to see how much it could be improved.

Out-of-box experience
Upon first switching on the Vaio TZ150N, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Vista’s login screen pops up just over a minute after a cold power-up, which isn’t that bad. But it’s what happens after you log in which can have you wondering if a PDA and keyboard might have been a better idea for banging out notes or emails.

We used Vista’s Resource Monitor to measure disk activity ­ you can fire this up from the standard Task Manager. Disk activity rarely stops altogether on a modern PC or laptop, but we’d say if it hovers below five per cent for any l ength of time, it’s pretty much poised for action.

So to measure the impact of the following tweaks, we timed how long it took from login to the point at which disk activity fell and consistently stayed below five per cent. We also timed how long it took to launch Photoshop CS3 once, followed by a second time (giving Vista a chance to cache it), and finally the time taken to shut down completely.

Out of the box, our Vaio TZ150N hammered its disk for just over five minutes after logging in, during which time it was effectively unusable; it even took over three minutes before the gadgets appeared on the desktop.

Launching Photoshop CS3 for the first time took 25 seconds, but closing and relaunching saw it cached and ready for action in just six seconds. Shutting down took just under a minute and a half.

Readyboost to the rescue?
Vista’s Readyboost technology claims to offer performance benefits, so we fitted a 1GB Corsair USB memory key and allowed Vista to use the recommended amount.

With the system restarted, the gadgets arrived slightly slower at just under four minutes, but Vista kept us waiting 11 minutes before the disk activity consistently stayed below five per cent. This longer time was down to Vista populating the key’s cache.

Sadly the 1GB of Readyboost did little to improve our application launch times, with Photoshop taking 27 and six seconds to launch the first and second times respectively. Shutdown was a little quicker at one minute and eight seconds.

We then tried a 2GB Crucial USB key, again allowing Vista to use the majority as recommended. This time the Gadgets arrived in two minutes and seven seconds, but overall we were looking at a longer wait of 13 minutes and 25 seconds before the disk activity slowed. That’s a quarter of an hour after first powering up the laptop, and frankly unacceptable. The application and shutdown times were again virtually unchanged.

Following our earlier desktop tests with Readyboost, we’d really not recommend this technology unless you’re running Vista on systems with 512MB of Ram ­ or less. And to be honest, with that amount of Ram, you shouldn’t bother with Vista at all.

Superfetch, be gone
Superfetch is another Vista technology that claims application performance benefits, but again at the cost of prolonged startup times ­ see section called What is Superfetch? for details on how it works. By default, Superfetch is enabled in Vista, so it had been running during all our laptop tests so far.

To adjust Superfetch, open Vista’s Administrative Tools Control Panel, enter Services, then scroll down the list until you find Superfetch and double-click it. You’ll now be offered the option to disable the feature.

With Superfetch disabled (and no USB keys fitted) we were disappointed to find the time to lower disk activity hardly improved at all from the out-of-box configuration ­ we were still looking at just over five minutes, but now suffering from slower application performance, with Photoshop taking almost twice as long to launch (46 and 14 seconds for first and second launches respectively).

We’ve found disabling Superfetch on some desktop configurations can seriously improve startup times, but it had no such benefit on our laptop configuration, proving you should never make assumptions and always test. But was this the best startup time we could hope for on the Vaio?

Startup items
Adjusting or disabling Superfetch and Readyboost can impact startup times, but if your system is taking longer than you’d like, we’d advise taking a look at the actual items loaded during startup.

Type System Configuration in the field marked ‘Start Search’ on Vista’s Start Menu, click the Startup tab and prepare yourself for a shock. Our brand new Vaio had no fewer than 26 items loading during startup, many of which were free trials and pointless Sony utilities. As always, disabling startup items takes some trial and error, but we quickly whittled the list down to eight items without compromising functionality.

The laptop disk activity now calmed in just one minute and 32 seconds ­ over three times faster than the standard configuration. Since Superfetch was still enabled, application performance was as good as we’d measured so far, and shutting down was quicker too at 56 seconds.

If you’re really keen on seeing what’s going on as you startup, check out the excellent free Autoruns utility from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals. This allows you to adjust a huge array of startup activity without any nannying popups.

Conclusion
There’s lots you can do to significantly improve the startup speed of a laptop without compromising its functionality ­ and crucially while Readyboost and Superfetch can slow a system power-up, a simple spring clean of the startup items made the biggest difference on our test system.

All systems can become clogged over time, but the big surprise is how many unnecessary items can already be present on a brand-new laptop. Our Vaio was effectively performing like an ageing system, delivering a very disappointing experience. The moral here is don’t assume a new system is anywhere near as clean as one that you’ve installed yourself.

So if you have a pre-built system that’s not performing as well as you’d like, check out its startup items, as well as experimenting with Superfetch and Readyboost. You may find significant gains are possible without upgrading the hardware or resorting to a different OS. That said, both are exactly what we’ll be doing to our Vaio in a future edition of Hardware, so stay tuned. As always, we’d love to hear from anyone who’s tweaked their laptop for the better ­ or worse.

What is Readyboost?
Readyboost is a Vista technology that is supposed to improve application performance, but at the cost of significant disk activity as your machine starts up.

As explained in September 2007, Readyboost creates an intermediate cache between your hard disk and Ram using Flash memory, such as a USB memory key. At first this seems odd, since hard disks deliver considerably quicker sequential data access, but decent Flash memory can actually outperform hard disks when it comes to small random-access transfers.

As shown in September and October last year, Readyboost is most effective on systems with modest amounts of Ram ­ indeed on systems with 2GB of Ram or more, we found it can actually slow some tasks. Readyboost can deliver performance benefits on certain systems with less than 1GB, but we’d recommend doing your own tests to see if it’s really helping.

What is Superfetch?
As explained in more detail in November 2007, Superfetch is Vista’s intelligent caching technology which preloads Ram with commonly used data, based on previous boots and application launches.

The more you use Vista, the more it learns your habits, and the more effective this caching should become.

As you start Vista, Superfetch and the standard Windows caching process begin populating Ram with files, and you can see this process in Task Manager, watching your free physical memory steadily decrease until there may only be a few megabytes remaining. At first this may seem distressing, but the memory’s just being used a cache and can be freed up to serve other tasks or applications as required.

Disabling Superfetch on a test desktop system reduced startup times from three minutes and 20 seconds to one minute and 38 seconds. Application startup times typically doubled though.