Vista Annoyances

I really like Vista. I really dislike Vista. And I suspect that most Vista users are in about this same frame of mind. Vista looks great. It features long overdue security improvements. But it's almost always doing something to the disk drives and it's making me crazy for two reasons: First, I can't seem to get a definitive answer from anyone about what Vista is doing. Second, all this disk activity makes audio playback about as enjoyable as listening to a scratched record on a bad turntable. Skips, pops, and jumps are common. Despite Vista's better appearance and enhanced security, I'm not certain that I'll still be using Vista at this time next year. But I'm making some headway on the constant disk thrashing. (That's what I wrote in late December, as I started working on this article; the problems have been largely solved, but only by using a gigantic hammer.)

Here is a list of suggestions for taming the wild Vista, along with an explanation of the benefits and the unintended consequences of performing these actions. If you choose to make any of these changes, be certain that you have a complete backup and use extreme caution in making the changes. Some settings have names similar to other settings; be sure that you have the right ones.

And be certain that you read the entire article before taking any action because the big-hammer solution may be the only one you need.

Safe Options with Few Consequences

Click on any of the images for a larger view.

Click for a larger view.Turn off Windows Services you don't need. To see what starts when Windows starts, use TUT (The Ultimate Troubleshooter) or System Configuration from the Control Panel's Administrative Tools entry. View the Services Tab. Although you can turn off services here, Windows will complain about it each time you start the computer.
A better way is to turn the services off from Administrative Tools, Computer Management Console. Drill down to the Services Tab, then stop and disable these services:

Click for a larger view.Turn off Windows features that you don't need. Open Programs and Features from the Control Panel and then click Turn Windows features on or off in the left panel. These are safe to deselect:

Click for a larger view.Click for a larger view.After completing either of these initial two steps, you will be asked to wait as the changes are applied and you will probably be asked to restart the computer.

Shut down Remote Differential Compression, which tracks changes in files over a network to limit bandwidth usage. If you're on a home LAN, you don't care about this because it won't help your LAN very much and it will slow your computer. Open Programs and Features from the Control Panel, then choose Turn Windows features on and off. Clear the check from Remote Differential Compression.

Click for a larger view.Improve SATA drive performance: Your computer probably has serial ATA (SATA) drives, but Vista will almost certainly have the settings all screwed up. Write caching may be enabled on your computer's SATA drives, but advanced performance probably will not. Both should be and maybe you can change them. Open the Device Manager from the Control Panel, then expand the Disk drives branch. Double-click on the first drive you want to modify, open Device Properties, and select the Policies tab. Make sure both write caching and advanced performance are selected.

Click for a larger view.I said that you might be able to change this. For my computer, I can't make the change. When I tried to make this change on a computer with 5 drives (2 internal Seagate SATA units and 3 external Seagate USB drives) the procedure failed. My user has admin privileges and I also tried making the changes when logged in as Administrator.

Internal SATA drives: The dialog says, "This device does not allow its write cache setting to be modified." In typical Microsoft fashion, it then allows me to change the setting, but discards it.

The external drives: I am permitted to change the setting for both write caching (with the warning about possible data loss) and advanced performance. However, the settings do not stick. It doesn't matter whether I reboot the system or just return to the dialog after closing it; the selections are both deselected when I return.

So, if you try this: Good luck.

Add more memory cache by assigning a 2GB or larger USB Flash drive to Readyboost. This feature provides extra RAM, which can substantially improve performance. Insert a USB flash drive, right-click the device in the Windows Explorer, Select the Readyboost Tab, click Use this device, and select how much space you want to use for RAM. But that probably won't work because ...

Readyboost Specifications Will Bite You

Click for a larger view.Chances are that unless you spent a lot of money for a super-speed thumb drive, Vista will thumb its nose at the paltry specs of whatever drive you plug in. But that doesn't mean you can't use the drive; it just means that you won't get all of the performance improvement that you might otherwise.

Click for a larger view.To find out if your drive meets the specifications, open the Windows Explorer (My Computer) after plugging in a thumb drive. Right-click the device and choose Properties. Then select the Readyboost tab. It will probably tell you that the drive isn't up to snuff. Tell Vista to stop testing the device when you plug it in and then click OK.

Click for a larger view.Hazardous step involving editing the Registry: Open the Registry Editor. No, I'm not going to tell you how; if you don't know how, you shouldn't be doing this. Navigate to:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt.
Click for a larger view.Find your drive in the list on the left. I have two Kingston DataTraveler devices, so how can I tell them apart? One has been tested, so it has an entry in the last-tested date. Once you've identified the device, click on Device Status in the right panel, change the value to 2, and press OK. Next change both ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs to 1000. Close the Registry Editor.

Click for a larger view.Now return to the Windows Explorer, right-click the device, and choose Properties. Now you can tell Vista to use the device and how much of the device to use. You have just lied to Vista and, while you should see some improvement, the device you're using still doesn't really meet Microsoft's specifications. But it will work.

In fact, until I used the big-hammer approach (below), this change had the greatest effect on my system's performance, so I recommend it. For better results, obtain a new flash memory device that suits Microsoft's specifications.

For best results, skip this step and add more RAM to your machine. Minimum needed for Vista: 2GB.

Turn off Windows Hibernation unless you use hibernation with your computer. (If it's a desktop, you probably don't. If it's a notebook, you may not want to because the hibernation services use a lot of system resources.) To disable Hibernation, choose Power Options from the Control Panel. Click Change Plan Settings, then Change Advanced Power Settings. Expand the Sleep selection, then expand the Hibernate After selection. Turn the setting down to zero.

Safe Options, but with Possibly Annoying Consequences

Click for a larger view.Turn off Windows Search Indexing: Indexing is supposed to speed searches and it does. Trouble is, that it slows down the computer the rest of the time. If you use Windows Search, leave the Indexing Service turned on; otherwise shut it off. To do this, you will need to do this to every disk drive on the computer. Start from Windows Explorer and right-click a disk. Choose Properties. Clear the check mark from "Index this drive for faster searching." You will see another dialog box: Specify that you want to apply this change to subfolders and files. The process of making this change could take half an hour or more. On disk drives with few files, it can take only a few seconds.

Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation: Windows Vista tries to keep your disk defragmented with a version of Diskeeper or you may have added the full version of the application. Even though Diskeeper does a good job of staying out of the way, it's probably better to run the defragmenter when it's convenient for you and not when it can cause performance problems. Right-click the C drive and select Properties. Click Defragment Now on the Tools tab, then clear the check from Run on a schedule.

Dangerous Options

Turn off Automatic Windows Defender Operation: Yes, some people do recommend this. I don't, so consider this only if you have a serious speed problem and you always practice safe (paranoid) computing practices. Windows Defender offers some protection against malware. If you want to disable it, select Windows Defender from the Control Panel, then Tools from the top menu, and Options. Clear the check from Automatically scan my computer.

Turn off System Restore: This can be extremely dangerous and I recommend against it. If you have a bullet-proof backup system in place and you are certain that you'll never need System Restore, you can disable it. I wouldn't, but here's how: Choose System from the Control Panel and select System Protection from the left panel. Clear the check mark from the main system drive. Hope for the best.

Disable User Access Control (UAC): Although some people detest this feature, I wouldn't disable it because it provides a safety net to protect your computer from malware. UAC requires that you confirm actions that are potentially dangerous. UAC doesn't affect the performance of the computer, but can slow some operations by asking for confirmation. To me, this is an acceptable slowdown, but if you want to disable it: Choose User Accounts from the Control Panel, click turn User Account Control on or off, clear the check from the User Account Control Box. Restart the computer. Cross your fingers.

Now You Have a Vista Speed Demon, Right?

The sad bottom-line truth is this: Even with these changes (the safe ones, anyway), I get far smoother audio playback with no skips, jumps, or pops when I use my 4-year-old notebook computer running Windows XP on a single-core processor that runs less than half the speed of the dual-core processor that's running Vista on the desktop. The desktop computer has twice the memory of the notebook computer and a far faster disk subsystem, yet with Vista I can't use it reliably for audio. And it gets worse. A nearly 8-year-old Mac Ibook with a 300MHz processor, a paltry 500MB of RAM, and an external USB hard drive beats the super-power Vista machine. That's really sad.

The addition of Readyboost caching seems to have helped audio playback a bit, but then I ran across a recommendation for an obscure change. If you have a sound card other than the basic built-in sound subsystem, the settings may differ a bit from this description. Open the Sound Control from the Control Panel, then double-click Speakers to open the Properties dialog. If you see "Enhancements" listed here, set to Disable All. Unfortunately, this seems (at least on my machine) to be another non-functional change: I change the setting and apply it. Vista changes is back.

The Story Continues: Using a Big Hammer to Solve the Problem

Volume Shadow Copy (which Microsoft inexplicably abbreviates as VSS—Volume Shadow Service, I presume) seems to be the culprit here. Although disabling VSS is not a good long-term solution, I decided to give the big hammer approach a try: I disabled Acronis services (2 items), Carbonite (1 item), VSS, and Windows Backup. Disk activity instantly dropped back into the normal range and Winamp started playing music without skips.

When I re-enabled VSS, disk activity increased substantially and the skips resumed. Enabling Carbonite with VSC still active seems to have a minimal effect. Carbonite depends on VSS for access to open files, but with VSS off and Carbonite on, backups occur normally, except that open files are skipped. I can live with that because audio recording and playback are possible again. Disk activity is normal.

This is an interim solution because turning off VSS also disables System Restore. Although I rarely use System Restore, it's a good feature to have enabled.

Conclusion: The Final Solution (Maybe)

Click for a larger view.After weeks of looking for what turned out to be a simple-but-elusive solution, I found information about the appropriate section of the Registry that controls what Volume Shadow Copy makes snapshots of. Apparently the default is "everything". In a computer with a single hard drive, that might be a good choice. In a computer with 5 hard drives, it's a lousy choice.

I returned to the Registry Editor and opened this key:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot

A few entries already existed. Initially, I decided not to omit any files on drive C, but I wanted to eliminate all VSS activity on drive D (data), drive M (audio files), drive N (work files), and drive Z (hot backups). After creating entries for those 4 drives, I turned VSS back on. Disk activity increased, but remained under control. Audio played back with only the occasional skip or stutter. It's still not a perfect solution, but maybe it's the best that I should expect.

Information about how to control VSS is probably on Microsoft's website somewhere, but I was never able to find it there. Instead, I finally located the information I needed on Computer Performance, a website in the UK.

But the conclusion has a postscript: After allowing VSS to run again, I noticed problems both with playback and recording, so I've disabled it again. At this point, I've promised myself that I will wait until service pack 1 ships (I'm not willing to try the beta) and if that doesn't fix the performance problems, I will reluctantly return to XP until the next version of Vista.

It really shouldn't be this hard!

When Updates Go Goofy

Click for a larger view.Sometimes I'm amazed by the tasks that I can accomplish with a computer and the right software. Recently I needed to eliminate the backgrounds from some photos. In some cases, the process was easy because the background was a single shade and the foreground object was sharply delineated. In other cases, the background was more complicated or the foreground differed only slightly from the background. Adobe Photoshop's new tools made the process far easier than it would have been just a year or two ago. If I'd been forced to use physical prints and an X-acto knife, the work would have taken far longer and the results would have been much worse. I'm equally amazed when something as simple as a basic upgrade goes completely bonkers.

Click for a larger view.As you can see in the image above (click it for a larger view), Adobe offered the ExtentScript Toolkit for Windows. It's a 5MB download, so it should take only a few seconds to obtain and install. But when I followed the link, I found that it was no longer a 5MB download. Now it was 28MB. Still nothing more than a 1-minute download and not much more to install it, or so I thought.

Click for a larger view.Then the download started. Now instead of 5MB or 28MB, it's advertised as being 253MB and Adobe says it's going to take more than 4 hours to dribble the file to my computer. Surely that's not right.

Click for a larger view.And, as expected, within a few moments, the expected download time had dropped to a more reasonable number. A fast Internet connection means that the download will take only 7 minutes or so. And the installation should be quick. Yes, sometimes I am rather gullible.

Click for a larger view.The file finished downloading and I started the installation process. It failed because Adobe's installer can't find Adobe's own products. The good news is that running the installer a second time caused the process to complete as expected. But that's also the bad news. When something like this fails once and then succeeds without any intervention by the user, I worry about what the cause was. Unlike humans, computers are not self-healing.

The Day of the Killer Apple

Continuing the theme of goofy updates, I have to thank Apple for an odd series of events that happened shortly after Steve Jobs' keynote address at Macworld on Tuesday: The Windows desktop system told me that it needed to install the Quicktime update (which also included an Itunes update) and my Apple Powerbook told me that it needed to install updates for OS X 10.5 Leopard. The Windows update killed Winamp and the Powerbook update killed the entire computer. Some days I wish that Apple would think a little less "different". Be sure to read this segment all the way to the end to get the entire story.

Killer Apple #1

I've largely stopped using Itunes (that's another story for another time) and now use Winamp as my primary audio playback program, but I keep Itunes on the computer to manage music on my Ipod and on my wife's Ipod. When I visited a website that used Quicktime to provide some of its content, it told me that I should upgrade.

Apple's website offered me Quicktime by itself or Quicktime with Itunes. I selected both. The download process and the installation procedure completed without incident, or so I thought. Then I tried to start Winamp. It started and immediately crashed. After trying to start Winamp a couple of times, I rebooted the computer and tried once more. Start and crash. Start and crash.

So I reinstalled Winamp on top of the existing installation. Start and crash. Start and crash.

I wasn't able to take the next step until the following day: I uninstalled Winamp and installed a clean version. Winamp didn't know about any of my music, about what I'd played recently, about what skin to use, or about what selections had been added recently, but at least it worked.

Thanks, Apple. That's bad enough, but what happens when Apple renders your notebook computer useless?

Killer Apple #2

The more serious issue involved my G4 Powerbook. The System Update function told me that a couple of updates were waiting and recommended that I install them. I did. The installation required a system restart, so I allowed that to happen.

Kernel panic.

Apple doesn't have blue screens of death (BSOD). When Unix crashes, the screen is black and the letters are white. And it's called a kernel panic because the operating system's kernel can't figure out what to do.

Apple's head honchos like to make fun of Microsoft's BSOD cryptic messages. When a Windows machine crashes, users will typically see a message that says something like "STOP 0x0000007B (0x81889ABO, 0XC00000032, 0xC00000032, 0x000000000, 0x000000000 INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE)". Generally speaking, you don't want to see any STOP message at boot time, and particularly not this one. But it's easy to note that it's a STOP error and the primary code is hex 7B. A Google search will quickly point even a novice user to various resources (including several at Microsoft) that will help you resolve the problem.

What does an Apple kernel panic look like? It's not pretty. And it's not exactly non-cryptic. A kernel panic dumps line after line of code that includes little more than a description of the problem ("kernel panic") and line after line of hex code numbers. This is supposed to be better than Microsoft's BSOD?

Apple must have an easy solution.

I grabbed the installation DVD, pushed it into the Powerbook's slot, and held down the (secret) C key to ensure that the system would boot the DVD. ("D" might be more reasonable, but Apple established "C" as the key to boot a CD disk.) I was offered the opportunity to install OSX 10.5 Leopard. I thought that maybe I could install Leopard over the existing version, but the DVD version was older than the installed version, so my options were:

The third option was clearly not acceptable. I could have lived with the second option, except that the Apple computer is mainly a toy and has little data on it. That left option one: Zero the disk and start over. Because I don't use the Powerbook as a production machine, this option was acceptable. If you own an Apple computer that you use for actual work, this may not be an acceptable option.

Fortunately, the Real Answer Was "None of the Above"

At the end of the update process OS X had asked for permission to restart the computer. When the machine restarted, it sat on one screen for more than 10 minutes. Eventually I concluded (and I think not unreasonably) that the system had crashed, so I powered the system off and let it restart to see if the problem was a one-time event. Shortly after the boot loader started reading from the hard drive, the same screen full of ominous text came back. I waited another 10 minutes and then shut the machine off again.

The next day, I thought I'd take a picture of the ominous text, so I started the computer and started unpacking the camera. About the time I had the camera ready, I noticed that the login screen had appeared. I logged in, OS X grumbled about a process being interrupted and then everything was normal. So clearly I have to take responsibility for not waiting long enough, but I believe that it's reasonable to say that Apple must share some of the blame. If a process will appear to be doing absolutely nothing for 15 minutes or more, it seems to me that Apple should have built several things into the process:

Bottom line: The update didn't kill the machine. I didn't have to reinstall the operating system and all the applications. But the process sure could have been a lot easier on my nerves. Being different isn't always being better.

Stupid Spams: Two for the Price of One

Wowie! Zowie!* The IRS has my Refund Ready

Click for a larger view.This is efficient. The IRS wants to send me my refund even though I haven't yet filed the return or even filled out any tax forms.

Dead giveaways? You bet. Let me count the ways:

Oh—and then there's the link that's hidden behind "click here". The link goes to a server in the "SU" top-level domain, and that's the TLD of the Soviet Union. The country doesn't exist any more, but Russia continued to maintain the domain and that of other soviet-era entities. I know that the dollar seems to be in free-fall and outsourcing is increasingly common, but I'm fairly sure that the IRS will have a GOV top-level domain and that it hasn't been outsourced to Russia.

*Apologies to Frank Zappa.

A Subject! A Subject! My Kingdom for a Subject!

Click for a larger view.The other day, when I glanced into the pile of suspected spam messages to confirm that no valid messages had accidentally been classified as spam, my job was easier than normal.

Usually I scan the senders and the subject lines. I can do 100 messages or more in less than a minute. On that day, I scanned more than 100 messages in less than 10 seconds. You'll notice that the messages shown at the right claim to be from a variety of senders, but they all have one thing in common: The subject is "RE:      ".

I knew in an instant that I could mark all of those messages for deletion without a second thought because I never send a message without a subject line. That means that I will never, ever receive a reply to a message without a subject line.

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