What Really Slows Windows Down

The follow up experiment testing more software with improved benchmarks. If you want to know what applications are slowing down your machine, check out this post.

Preamble

A week ago, I performed a study demonstrating how certain applications can slow down Windows. If you didn't catch it, I'll sum things up now.

I took a clean Virtual PC install of Windows XP Pro (SP2a) and installed Microsoft BootVis on it. For those not in the know, BootVis is a tool that lets you time how long windows takes to start up. It does a lot more, but I wasn't interested in any of that for the experiment. I've had a lot of feedback via email over it: mostly praise and suggestions for the next round-up.

Lots of people complained about me using Virtual PC. The reason I chose it at the time is because I know from experience that VMWare is about 1000times heavier on the host OS. It installs drivers and system services all over the place and is generally unpleasant unless you need to use it all the time.

Most of the suggestions that filtered into my inbox were for other antivirus systems. I've added a bevy of different applications and I've also re-benched Norton InternetSecurity, considering this did worst of all the applications tested last time. Searching on places that the old article got linked from, I saw that Norton got quite a bad (but not unexpected) deal, so I wanted to make sure that this wasn't unjust.

The Host System

Some people also commented that it would make more sense if they knew more about the physical setup I've been running the tests on. So for them, here's what my PC is:

• AMD 64 X2 4800+
• 2Gig DDR RAM
• 2x 36Gig WD Raptors in RAID0 (system OS)
• 2x 120Gig Seagate Barracudas in JBOD (one for VM, other as the scratch disk)
• 3x 300Gig Maxtor DM10s in RAID5 (nothing to do with any of this =])

The more astute will have noticed that I've got two cores (effectively two processors). For both the experiments I set the affinity of all the host OS programs to one core and set the VM onto the other core. The VM also had 512megs (of 2048) RAM dedicated to it. I also used two HDs for the system. One was a read only base-image of Windows and the other was used as the "scratch" disk – in short where all the changes were made.

There were also a lot of people saying that the figures I was providing did not reflect accurately on what really slows windows down. I think that's slightly fair although it's also a fair assumption that if something is bogging down the start up, it's going to continue its reign of terror all the way through your lovely Windows session.

Pages

1. Introduction
2. The New Benchmarks
3. Norton Internet Security 2007
4. The Contenders
5. Results and Conclusions

Written by Oli on Friday, 22 September 2006. Tagged with benchmarks, windows, other. Read 273942 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

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#1 /* 3 years, 10 months ago */

Glad to see that Norton straightened themselves out a little bit; however, that boot time is still way too high for me to worry about purchasing a copy of their software. I'll stick to "being careful."

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Michael Chase Anonymous User

#2 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

In reference to your forthcoming article, i've found the best way to speed windows up, is to un-install xp, install 98, and play the random delete file game from back when I only had a 800mb had drive and had to squeeze windows and half-life both on it! Delete files until something breaks, when it breaks, you know for the next install you cant delete that file.. ive had it around 20ish MB before :)...

Sorry, thats completely irrelevant, but I miss the good old days! Excellent article as always sir, your results proved the rough idea I had in my head of how the security products performed. I have to speed up a lot of Norton PC's for private customers when im freelancing. Ive recently gotten rid of Mcafee Enterprise 8 and replaced it with Avast much to my happyness! For speeding up windows, as well as the service tweaks, ive found TweakNow Powerpack2006 to be relatively useful, makes enough of a difference to notice, including boot times.

Cheers dude!

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skirky or eQuaZ0r Anonymous User

#3 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

Really great job on the "what slows windows" down. I've been recently trying to find on my own system what is causing large slow bootup times. I'm thinking that Google Desktop Sidebar / Search may be something interesting to check. ...and if you decide to check out antivirus suites, be sure to take a look at F-secure/Kasperky, recently rated as the "best" detecting antivirus and antispyware suite in its Internet Security offerings.

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Rattanjeet Anonymous User

#4 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

I would like to see yoru review the free Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic. http://www.free-av.com/

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bob jones Anonymous User

#5 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

Glad my computer doesn't need any of that crappy antivirus, spyware garbage...

its a Mac, and sweet as a nut.

Why do you guys put up with all that sh*t?

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Jon T Anonymous User

#6 — Author comment /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

@Jon

I don't put up with any of that shit... I still use windows, I just use Common Sense as my AV.

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Oli Numero Uno

#7 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

My opinion with watching Norton Internet Security over the last couple of years is that it is getting more and more bloated every release. Every release what they seem to be doing, is adding new features (which is fine by itself), but they add one or two more (new) background services in doing so every time, I am not sure how many services Norton Internet security runs on now, but it must be at least over 6 or 8 or even more, which is ridiculous really.

What I am experiencing in the real world is that a lot of people only have 256Mb of RAM and Norton Internet Security 2006 requires so much RAM that these PC's have no more physical RAM left over (even when no programs are running) and start using the swap file constantly and the PC comes to a crawl, taking Nortons off and using the XP2 firewall + AVG free edition uses much less RAM, runs less processes and the machines become much faster. Norton Internet Security 2006 appears to require at least 512Mb of RAM to prevent the swap file from being used constantly, which is far too much RAM used.

In my mind, what needs to happen with Norton Internet Security, is they need to combine a lot of the tasks into only a few services (i.e. optimize), instead of heaps of separate services/background tasks like it is now, I am sure a lot of RAM can be saved by optimizing sections of the code too. I have looked at PC's with only 256Mb of RAM running Norton Internet Security 2006, and Norton's is actually using MORE ram that Windows XP itself, which is getting ridiculous really, in my mind, Windows XP SP2 firewall + AVG free edition + Firefox to prevent spyware that comes through ActiveX holes is more than enough and doesn't require half as much RAM, but then again I primarily run Ubuntu myself.

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Rob Anonymous User

#8 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

Great Article, Was wondering if you could also run some tests on P2P apps, Emule/utorrent and some other media players like PowerDvd,WinDvd,Media Player Classic.

Also some other suggestions on software would be imgburn/dvddecrypter/photoshop/Kaspersky AV/Kerio Firewall/sygate/outpost

also to test it would be cool if a test was conducted which was ran before and after a defrag? That would be aswome

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CrisCr0ss Anonymous User

#9 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

You should not do performance tests in a virtual machine. Main reason is the condition of the host machine at the given moment. You know that that VM is just another application on the system that shares cpu and IO with the main system. True performance tests are done on a real machine where all tests are run on the same restored each time image.
There is one more thing that you should have mentioned in your tests. Do all security suites have a boot time driver that starts scanning when no user mode application has started? I doubt - namely, McAfee and Microsoft both scan in user mode meaning their boot time performance degradation in theory should be 0% but it is not. Norton's driver starts at the system time which means it scans during the boot file IO intensive process. This protects the machine for worms such as FunLove that infect just when the network drivers are up and functioning among other things. I think you should set all software to have the same options and then only run your tests.
Cheers,
Mike

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Mike Anonymous User

#10 /* 3 years, 9 months ago */

why NAV 2002 and the rest of the progs are new?

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meofcourse Anonymous User

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