Windows search

SEARCH: Shutting down Windows Search recovered more than 250MB of RAM

The SuperFetch caching service can grab plenty of RAM, too, and it isn't always effective, but on balance it's still worth keeping it running. You wouldn't want these services to disappear forever, then, but what about if you created a batch file to turn them off just temporarily? This could free up a considerable amount of RAM.

You may then get better performance out of a game or some other heavy-duty application that you're trying to run, and you could use another batch file to restore the services when you're done.

To give this a try, launch 'Services.msc', double-click each service you'd like to disable and make a note of its short name. This is labelled as 'Service name' on the dialog. Now create a file called Turbo-On.bat that uses the net stop command (as shown below) to close each service.

Feel free to leave SuperFetch enabled if it helps the particular app that you're trying to prioritise, and of course you can add as many other services or programs as you like, just as long as they're not system critical.

Here we've included a sample line that would shut down Skype's services:

net stop wsearch
net stop sysmain
'\program files\skype\phone\skype.exe' /shutdown

Then create a second file called Turbo-Off.bat that uses the net start command to relaunch everything, as here:

net start wsearch
net start sysmain
'\program files\skype\phone\skype.exe'

Store these files somewhere safe, and create shortcuts to each. Next, right-click the shortcut, click 'Properties | Shortcut | Advanced' and check 'Run as administrator'. Now, whenever you need the maximum possible performance, launch the 'Turbo-On.bat' shortcut to free up some RAM and system resources. Then fire up 'Turbo-Off. bat' when you're done to restore normal operations.

So far we've concentrated on absolute ways to divert your PC's resources. But what about those programs that you must leave running, but aren't system-critical – such as mail apps? It's possible to recover resources from these applications, too, although it may take a little extra work to do so.

Let's assume that you always need to have Outlook running in the background. By default this may grab processor time on any of your CPU cores (assuming you've got a multicore CPU). You can restrict the app to just one, freeing up the others for different programs.

In Process Hacker, right-click the 'Outlook.exe' process, click 'Affinity' and ensure that only 'CPU 0' is checked. Repeat the process with other non-essential programs that you have launched (nothing security-related though, and no Windows components).

Their performance will fall a little because they're restricted to one CPU, but the rest of your apps should now benefit, as they get improved access to the rest of your system's cores. Another way to make other apps run quicker is to reduce the CPU and I/O priority of a background process.

Windows does this itself with the Windows Search indexer and other components so that they don't interfere too much with foreground apps, and you can apply the same trick yourself to limit a program's impact on your system.

In Process Hacker, right-click the process you'd like to change (avoiding security tools, Windows components and anything system critical) and select 'Priority | Idle'. Then right-click the process again and select 'Miscellaneous | I/O Priority | 0' to make sure that it gets the least possible share of your system's attention.

You could also increase the priority of more important processes to High, which may mean that they get more CPU time, but be careful – doing so is risky. It's more likely that your programs will block Windows' own processes from running, and that could result in your PC crashing or locking up.

Don't expect too much from these techniques, though, especially if you don't have many background processes. With just Outlook and a browser running in the background on our machine, our tests showed that priority and affinity tweaking delivered only a two to five per cent improvement in foreground application performance.

However, if your PC is packed with busy background processes, this can be a very useful way to manage them. If you see good results then you can change your program shortcuts so that you're able to launch them using the command line 'start.exe' tool, which can set their priority and affinity without Process Hacker's help.

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