More Ways to Speed Up Windows 7

In my post ‘10 Simple Ways To Speedup Windows 7‘, I covered some easy ways to make Windows 7 faster. If you’re looking for even more speed from your Windows 7 PC, then here are more ways to speed up Windows 7:

Speedup External Hard Drives

Write caching is disabled for external drives by default in Windows, so that you can remove external drives without losing any data. Enabling write caching will provide a significant performance increase for external drives:

1. Click Start and type “Device Manager” and open Device Manager
2. Expand “Disk drives” and right-click your external hard drive and select Properties
3. click the “Policies” tab and click “Optimize for performance”
4. Check “Enable write caching on the device” and “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device” then click Ok
5. Reboot to apply changes

Increase SATA Disk Performance

Enabling write caching will also improve SATA hard drive performance

1. Follow steps 1 to 3 above, but select your SATA drives
2. Only check “Enable write caching on the device” and then click Ok
3. Reboot to apply changes

Faster Menus & Mouse

Reduce the amount of time it takes for menus to appear:.

1. Click Start and type “regedit” and open the Registry Editor
2. Left-click on the expandable arrow next to HKEY_CURRENT_USER and expand the Control Panel folder, and then select “Desktop”
3. On the right hand side find “MenuShowDelay” and doubleclick it. Reduce the value to any number between 400 (default) and 1 – the lower the number the smaller the delay in ms between clicking on a menu and the action occuring
4. Now below Desktop on the left select “Mouse”. On the right hand side find “MouseHoverTime” and doubleclick and chose a low number for faster mouseovers
5. Reboot

Disable Thumbnail Previews

Windows 7’s thumbnail preview feature takes up a lot of resources just to show a few small images rather than folder icons. To disable the thumbnail previews:

1. Open Computer and click on “Organise” in the menu and select “Folder and Search” options
2. Click on the “View” tab and in the “Files and Folders” options check the “Always show icons, never thumbnails” option
3. Click “Apply” and then OK

Faster Windows 7 Taskbar

Another registry tweak that will reduce the amount of resources used to create your Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnail previews:

1. Click Start and type “regedit” and open the Registry Editor
2. Left-click on the expandable arrow next to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER” and then “Software” and expand until you get to the Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced folder
3. Right click on Advanced and select “New DWORD”, then enter the following value: “ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime”
4. Right click on “ThumbnailLivePreviewHoverTime” and select “Modify”. Choose “Decimal Base” and enter your new number in milliseconds. A good number to use is 200.
5. Select “Ok” and then reboot