This guest post is by Igor Leyko, Microsoft MVP – Windows System & Performance, and is reprinted here with his permission.

There are many sites that change Windows behavior or settings, some of which even disable services or functionality. It is interesting that almost none of these sites explain the real benefits of tweaking Windows. You may see assurances such as "The system seems to be much faster" or promises of a 10 to 20 percent performance gain. I’ve even seen a promise to make a Windows system up to 50 times faster!

However, it is difficult to find any measurable results. Few sites present actual results metrics, and when they do, the numbers primarily report decreased boot times. [I ignore the "fake" with changing Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) during installation to 486C compatible.] While you may decrease the boot time, there are not strong dependencies between boot time and performance. The boot process has significant differences with work processes. Moreover, decreasing boot time may actually increase application start times.

Can you have metrics that show the real effects of any tweaking? In theory, yes. But in practice, no.

During the Windows 98 era, I conducted a study on the influence of the ConservativeSwapfileUsage registry key on overall system performance and used mathematical statistics methods to analyze the results. I found I had to conduct hundreds of tests to get accurate and trustworthy system performance results. Do you think someone can spend a week or two accumulating test results to determine the effects that can be achieved by tweaking Windows? I think the answer is no.

Windows is a complex operating system with background processes that may affect performance test results. Therefore, results from repeated tests may differ by 2 to 3 percent, or more. The effect of tweaking is, on average, less than 2 to 3 percent. However, after one or two tests, it is hard to say if there is a real difference in results or just random deviation.

So, what about claims such as those mentioned above: "The system seems to be much faster." Are these claims false? No, the system really may seem faster after tweaking. However, it may not actually be any faster. We tend to perceive things we want to believe regardless of their actual existence.

Have you seen how wine tasters work? They taste numbered rather than named wines. The blind method makes the comparison valid. However, when you know what you are comparing, there is no way to avoid subconscious reactions. Unfortunately, this is why useless programs may sell very well. Just believe the computer must be faster and most likely you’ll perceive that it is.

Ten years ago I wrote a program to improve Windows performance on Pentium I computers with certain hardware. The program didn’t work with any other hardware, but its description was very convincing—so much so that several e-mails I received from users demonstrated the power of suggestion. Users wrote feedback such as: "The log file says ‘not installed’; however I am SURE it is, because things seem A LOT faster."

Now let’s turn to another side of "tweaking theory." Do you believe developers are missing opportunities to enhance Windows performance, or that they don’t consider tweaks? I don’t. The Windows performance team inside Microsoft runs a variety of performance benchmarks/workloads on a wide spectrum of machines.

At first, the results of the struggle for performance may not seem very impressive, but a 5 percent difference in performance difference is a large difference. And a couple of simple and easy tweaks may result in performance increases that are as high as 10 percent.

You may not feel that 5 to 10 percent performance increases can really make a difference, but they actually can. The primary operational system task is to run user applications. The fewer resources the operating system uses, the faster applications run. Suppose Windows (n-1) might normally use 10 percent of computer resources and an application uses the remaining 90 percent. Or suppose, instead, that Windows (n+1) is twice as efficient (a great achievement) and uses 5 percent of computer resources. In that instance, the application will run 95/90 = 1.056 times faster. This example shows that a significant difference in the operating system development can give only a small gain in overall performance. And this is a huge contradiction for tweaking to improve performance. Tweaking just can’t give the results you want.

I asked Michael Fortin, Distinguished Engineer for Windows, if the Windows team studies published tweaks and tips. Fortin said, "I asked a bunch of [team] people and was a little surprised. What I found is that most people do things, but collectively it all started to also look like buzz about nothing. With one exception: uninstall stuff you aren’t using."

So, I conclude that almost all Windows tweaks are fairly useless when it comes to speeding up your computer. To achieve significant results, you’ll need to buy a new computer or upgrade your existing system; at the very least, you’ll need to uninstall some rarely used programs.

Finally, I want to give you some tips on considering a few commonly suggested "optimizations":

• If you see a tip to set SecondLevelDataCache registry key, keep in mind that it has not been used since Windows 2000 SP1.
• If you see a claim that the DisablePagingExecutive key may increase performance, it is false. It actually may decrease overall performance; however, because it decreases response time, the system seems faster.
• Setting the processor or core numbers in Msconfig cannot speed up booting because all cores are used by default.

Igor Leyko has worked with computers since 1974. He is a Windows System & Performance MVP. This is an abstract of an article that will be published in Russian at www.iXBT.com.

Did I mention that Carl Siechert and I have finally finished Office 2010 Inside Out? It’s true! We finished principal writing on July 12, and since then we’ve been going through the editing process, with some some extensive rewriting in a few places (especially the chapters about Office Web Apps, which changed pretty dramatically between March and July). We’ve read every page of the final proofs, and it’s now in the hands of our crack production team who’ll ship it off to the printer in time to hit what I am told is a September 20 on-sale date.

The book will be just under 1000 pages, and you can pre-order it at Amazon today for $34.64 (price guaranteed not to go up, but can go down). Or, if you prefer a digital format, you can wait till next month and get a DRM-free copy in any or all of four different e-book formats. That should be in advance of the on-sale date for print editions. I’ll post a notice here as soon as I have one in my hands (or on my screen).

If you’re a developer and you’re on the fence about whether to attend Microsoft’s PDC10 conference in October, maybe you should look a little more closely. One of the benefits all attendees will get is the opportunity to attend a pre-opening cocktail party at the Microsoft Company Store, where you can shop at employee prices:

Join us at the Microsoft Visitor Center (Building 92) for a private evening cocktail reception exclusively for PDC attendees.  This is a great opportunity to avoid the lines and check-in early, stroll through the visitor center, enjoy food/drink/conversation with fellow attendees, and…wait for it…shop the Microsoft Company Store!  […]

Please note that this benefit does not entitle you to free software, however, you will be allowed to purchase at the employee rate.  If you’ve never heard of the ‘Microsoft employee discount’, just trust me – it’s an amazing deal.

Having shopped at the store before, I’ll second that. Prices for hardware are OK, but discounts for software are amazing. I’ve seen discounts of 80-90% on some products, including Windows and Office. Attending PDC gives you the opportunity to purchase up to $120 worth of products—that amount goes a long way.

There are all sorts of other good reasons to go to PDC if you’re a developer. With Microsoft’s cloud services and with IE9 just around the corner, it’s actually an exciting time to watch Windows again.

If you’ll be there, let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@edbott). If there’s enough interest maybe we can put together a geek dinner/gathering of some sort.

I had back-to-back reminders last week of the importance of having regular backups.

On Monday, I helped a friend and occasional client restore Windows 7 to his notebook after Dell replaced his hard drive under warranty and helpfully (ha ha ha) included a spanking clean Windows XP image. Gee, thanks.

Early this year when I helped him upgrade to Windows 7, I had impressed on him the need to get an external hard drive and do regular backups. He assured me he had backing up religiously, but when we tried to restore those backups the process failed. It turned out that he wasn’t using the Windows Image Backup utility. Instead, he had installed the NTI backup program that had come with his external hard drive. Those "full backups" contained way too little data to be full images and were unrecoverable anyway.

Fortunately, he had hung on to the original hard drive, which was still readable. With the help of an external SATA-to-USB converter I was able to get all his data back with no problems. If the original drive had been dead instead of just flaky, this story would have had a much unhappier ending. Still, what should have been a 10-minute image restore turned into a two-hour wild goose chase followed by a clean install and manual file transfer. Tedious. Not fun.

Then, on Thursday, our friendly local appliance repairman came by the house to look at our misbehaving dishwasher. As he disassembled it, he mentioned in passing that he and his wife had been having a world of problems with their PC, which was now displaying error messages about the hard disk at startup and then locking up. We talked about the probable solution (get a new hard drive), and when I asked about backups he sheepishly admitted he didn’t have any. He’d been thinking about it, especially given that this drive had acted up earlier, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. His wife could retype her resumes and if they lost some music, no big deal. He was thinking about getting another iPod so he could have his music collection in two places.

I told him he’d get much better bang for his backup buck by getting an external hard drive and upgrading from Windows Vista Home Premium to the equivalent edition of Windows 7, which includes the image backup program. He was shocked when I told him how far the prices of good-sized external hard drives had dropped. We’ll see if he gets backup religion.

Anyway, the moral of these two stories is pretty straightforward: Back up. And make sure you’re actually backing up everything you think you are.

What’s your backup strategy? And have you checked your backups lately?

When I visited the ASUS website this morning to get the latest drivers for a new disk controller, I was greeted with this message:

Priceless.

Man, it’s been a long, long road for Ceton. Their four-tuner CableCARD-compatible device was announced in November 2007. Now, nearly three years later, it’s still not on the market. But it’s getting closer. The last word I heard, from the company itself and from knowledgeable outside sources, was that the cards would be shipping by the end of June. But that date came and went, and yesterday a post by a Ceton rep at The Green Button announced that the InfiniTV 4 tuners are finally in production and maybe, just maybe, they’ll get here by the end of this month:

We want to pass along some good news and let you know that the Ceton InfiniTV 4 quad-tuner cards are now in production! Ceton personnel are currently overseas supervising the final assembly and testing process. We’re sorry for the unexpected delays but many other companies were hit with parts shortages as we were, including Apple for the release of iPad and iPhone 4. Delivery of units will begin as soon as final testing and shipment from overseas have been completed. We’ll update you shortly as soon as we can confirm an actual delivery date.

I placed my order a while back and was hoping to have it in time for the season debut of Mad Men on July 25. Looks like there’s an outside chance that will happen.

Meanwhile, I’m baffled why Ceton doesn’t post stuff like this on its web site or through its Twitter account.

Your average techie probably hasn’t read Consumer Reports in years, but they’re still big in the heartland. And that’s why this is big news:

Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can’t recommend the iPhone 4

It’s official. Consumer Reports’ engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone’s lower left side—an easy thing, especially for lefties—the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you’re in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.

The report also suggests that Apple is being less than candid about the problem:

Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that "mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength."

And my favorite part:

We did, however, find an affordable solution for suffering iPhone 4 users: Cover the antenna gap with a piece of duct tape or another thick, non-conductive material. It may not be pretty, but it works.

Ouch.

It took longer than expected, but Carl Siechert and I finally finished writing Office 2010 Inside Out. We’re about halfway through page proofs and looking forward to getting this book to the printer soon.

Normal blogging will resume shortly.

URL shorteners are becoming extraordinarily popular, thanks mostly to Twitter. The need to cram a full URL into 140 characters has spawned services like bit.ly, is.gd, and Twitter’s new t.co. URL shorteners convert the real URL to one that takes up fewer characters. So http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/office-starter-2010-drops-the-crapware-adds-ads/2220 becomes http://is.gd/cQkSS. (Both links lead to the same page.) And there are lots of shortening services, which means my original link could also be (and certainly is) translated into links from bit.ly and tinyurl.com and goo.gl and even ZDNet’s official domain, zd.net.

The problem is, the shortening process is also destructive, removing some key data points that you need to make an informed trust decision about whether to click that link. What domain is it from? Is it one I am confident will not be compromised? Does the name of the link provide any clues about its content?

With short URLs, you lose those data points. My original very long URL gives me all sorts of clues that allow me to set my expectations with confidence. I know it’s at a domain I trust, zdnet.com, and I can even divine the title of the article. The shortened URL tells me nothing.

The consequences of following a bad link can be unfortunate. After I got a couple of very suspicious links from a couple of unrecognized Twitter accounts yesterday, I passed them along to Chris Boyd (@paperghost on Twitter) who wrote about the phenomenon on The Sunbelt Blog (see "PDF exploit spam run on Twitter") and also pointed to a technical article at the Trend Micro blog: "New malicious Twitter spam."

Here’s how it works: A hostile Twitter account churns out messages that say, “Wow, a marvelous product” or "I Just Cant Believe This," accompanied by a handful of user names to make sure they get seen.

Click the link, and you might be redirected to some sort of paid movie service. […]

If you’re unlucky, however, you’ll end up at a URL such as fqsmydkvsffz(dot)com/tre/vena(dot)html, where PDF exploits await.

So how do you protect yourself? One way is to be suspicious of short URL services and check the link before you visit the page. One feature I like about TweetDeck is it shows a preview of the URL when you click a shortened URL.

I like the fact that Bit.ly has an API that allows third parties to customize their domain for short links. When I see a short URL from the zd.net domain, I am very confident that it is safe to click on and in fact I know that I am going to go to the ZDNet site.

If you’re suspicious about a short link, you can often preview its contents by pasting the link into a browser and then tacking a suffix onto it. For a link from is.gd, for example, you can add a minus sign (hyphen) to the end of the URL to visit a preview page hosted on the is.gd servers. You can preview a bit.ly link by tacking a plus sign onto the end. If you’re suspicious of a link, copy it to the Clipboard, paste it into the address bar, and add the appropriate suffix.

The URL shortening services are also reacting to complaints fairly swiftly. The hostile links I saw yesterday were disabled within 24 hours. Here’s what I saw when I visited one of those links a few minutes ago:

Bit.ly has an excellent statement of how it handles security:

bit.ly uses data from a number of independent sources in addition to its own internal classifiers to determine whether or not destination sites propogate [sic] spam, viruses, or other malware. The third party sources include Sophos, Websense, VeriSign, PhishTank, and Google Safe Browsing. For Firefox and Chrome browser users, we also have a Preview Plugin that allows you to view link details before clicking. If you are a Twitter user, similar preview features are available from Tweetdeck (see a write-up of how it works here)

The goal of the bad guys is to get you to click on their link, and they’re good enough at it  to warrant some respect. Ultimately, there are a lot of links I simply don’t click, especially those that ostensibly lead to shocking or amusing videos and articles. The reward isn’t worth the risk. Links from strangers are always suspicious, but a link that appears to be from a friend might actually be from a hacked Facebook or Twitter account. And you have no idea of where it really goes.

So, seriously: Be careful what you click.

If you’re interested in this topic, it’s worth reading DeWitt Clinton’s recent "More thoughts on URL shorteners," which covers this topic in much more depth than I can do here. Highly recommended reading.