Introduction

A desktop that is slow and takes a long time to load applications must be tuned to ensure the best performance possible. Indeed, purchasing expensive hardware upgrades can sometimes be avoided with proper tuning. In this chapter, we will explore essential techniques to monitor and optimize your desktop s performance. We will learn how to optimize your startup performance, hard disk speeds, and virtual memory to both better the performance of your applications and the overall computer user experience.

With Windows Vista, each computer will receive a Windows Experience Index Score. This index indicates the overall score of different core components of the computer. We will study how to interpret this index score and what can be done to improve it. We will also cover details about optimizing Windows startup, optimizing the hard disk, memory, application performance, and the network connection. Finally, we will cover the performance monitoring tools included in Windows Vista.

The Windows Experience Index

The Windows Experience Index is new in Windows Vista. This is a score that the operating system assigns to your computer based on the capabilities of core components of the computer. The higher the score, the better the overall performance of the computer. These components and the basis of their score are as follows:

• Processor Calculations per second.

• Memory Memory operations per second.

• Graphics Desktop performance for Windows Aero.

• Gaming Graphics 3D business and gaming graphics performance.

• Primary Hard Disk