Windows 7 Optimizing Windows 7 on an Older PC: Tips for Performance & Aero Issues

Firstly adding programs rarely increases performance, although theres always the option of stripping out un-needed services that can grab back some system ram.

As for drivers, well N5200 are very old cards so all the drivers will likely be well out of date it's likely windows itself has a native driver built in thats newest.

Really on that rig Aero should be off and set to the basic profile as that will save a lot of performance also.

Well im suing aero without transperancy, people says that aero without transperancy is just like basic design.
About drivers, yes, my cars is very old, but i mean maybe you know any drivers which aint from nvidia.com i mean, i need new ones, beter ones, not 96xx if i could get like 175 drivers - that would be perfect

Well yeh i know that XP is for me like 3x beter for perfomance (and i have xp in pc - double boot). but Windows7 is soooo good for listening music, for working, i mean its just so comfortible, + windows7 is something new, xp is just booring
i dont know about drivers, i mean in xp i got like 60fps in windows7 i got 45fps - thats bad for otehr stronger games :/ Taht game takes 70mb of ram and ~65% of cpu. So everyone say - its not ram or cpu, its old driver's folt.
And by the way, you say that minimum is 1gb of ram, well im using home premium, and its optimized(running pretty well) and only taking about ~40-50% of ram. So it aint much and i really dont need 1gb of ram.

Noskas said:

Well yeh i know that XP is for me like 3x beter for perfomance (and i have xp in pc - double boot). but Windows7 is soooo good for listening music, for working, i mean its just so comfortible, + windows7 is something new, xp is just booring
i dont know about drivers, i mean in xp i got like 60fps in windows7 i got 45fps - thats bad for otehr stronger games :/ Taht game takes 70mb of ram and ~65% of cpu. So everyone say - its not ram or cpu, its old driver's folt.
And by the way, you say that minimum is 1gb of ram, well im using home premium, and its optimized(running pretty well) and only taking about ~40-50% of ram. So it aint much and i really dont need 1gb of ram.

Click to expand...

Seeing that have fairly old hardware, selecting which drivers to use may be a tough one. If you can't find newer drivers on nvidia's site (can't remember if they still support the 5 series with newer releases), you may be better off using the ones that Windows suggests itself, like mentioned in a previous post. However, if you're trying to run newer games, you'll probably be better using the newest drivers you can find from nvidia.

In terms of OS performance, you may actually be better off leaving Aero enabled, as long as your video ard can run it. Reason being, as long as Aero is running, the system is actually putting more of the processing burden on your GPU, which is putting less strain on the rest of your system. Sure Vista was probably a dog on that card, especially with 128mb of frame buffer, but 7 has been optimized, specifically in how it utilizes video ram as it needs to draw more & more windows, so it actually uses video memory more efficiently.

In terms of RAM, like you mentioned, you're only seeing 50% of it in use. You may see an increse in OS performance with more, but it would probably have to be a lot more than simply moving up to a ful 1GB (think 2GB+). Starting with Vista & continuing with 7, the OS will try to use as much RAM as possible to ensure maximum performance with the given system config. Unlike older OSes like XP, windows doesn't leave RAM unused & instead uses as much as it can to cache files. As the need arises to utilize RAM for actual programs, it will adjust the RAM as needed.

Of course, there's always a difference between what the OS "should" do with a given set of hardware specs as mentioned in reviews & various publications and what it "actually" does in real life.....mileage always seems to vary. In terms of general computing needs, if your system ran great on XP, it should run really well in 7.

If you're mostly happy with how it runs in 7, I say stick with it. You can always save & upgrade when money permits. I'm sure tweaks & patches/service packs will also help the OS run a bit better over time.

LikeABoss said:

In terms of OS performance, you may actually be better off leaving Aero enabled, as long as your video card can run it.

Click to expand...

I had the same card and it does run it but it's not so much the RAM usage as the extra pressure on the CPU when scrolling/dragging windows, loading apps etc. The desktop window manager service (dwm.exe) always used 3-4% of the CPU even when idle, and around 100MB of RAM on Vista. Now on W7 it's only using 36MB with the default theme, aero enabled. But it was the extra CPU load that made things load slower and seem very sluggish on my old rig. The only remedy was to use the 'Classic' theme, but then it just looked like Windows 2000 only a lot slower; that's why I went back to XP.