Speeding up the laptop

Almighty1 · Jul 8, 2023

abactuon said:
On my Asus i7-11370H laptop I couldn't do 'undervolting' when using Windows 10 (but two years ago). And there is no voltage access in the bios, you can only disable virtualisation.
Is it just Windows or is there firmware dependency?
Yes, on my previous MSI i5-9400H laptop everything would have worked.

It does depend on firmware too because I know there are some bioses that originally had access to undervolting somehow lost it when the bios version was upgraded. It's called Plundervolt.

Intel & OEMs are disabling undervolting. Here's how to re-enable it

In any case, you may want to look at this:

In my case, Windows File Explorer is non-responding most of the time except when the system first starts up.

What exact model is your ASUS i7-11370H?

Rollback_Jockey · Jul 8, 2023

I gave 2 of my laptops an extra turn of speed by finding more powerful CPU's, i was lucky they were socketed.

MilesAhead · Jul 8, 2023

cereberus said:
The fastest OS was DOS?

What complete nonsense.

DOS used to run on 4.77 MHZ pcs. A modern pc is a thousand times faster and will run far more sophisticated OSs at zillions of times the speed.

Windows 3.0 running on my 50 Mhz 486 w/16 MB ram was actually Dos 5.x with a 64KB Windows.com shell on top. I know because I installed Dos 5 and then Windows 3.0 over it. If you just installed Windows 3.0 then you did not notice the Dos 5 because it booted into the shell. But because I installed separately my boot manager booted Dos 5. If I wanted to run Windows 3.0 I entered Windows at the command line and up came the Program Manager.

Probably for speed and not using resources on graphical desktops running a single user Linux dedicated to one program, like some scientific research app or something, would be fastest since it would know how to use multi-GB of ram and run on x64 cpus.

Edit: But to TM's point, I used to run Ray Trace Dos programs on this 486 and they usually completed within 90 minutes. Much faster than on Windows 95 on the same machine using the same Ray Tracer ported to Windows.

Ghot · Jul 8, 2023

As Galileo discovered, at the University of Pisa, in the late 1500s...
...tossing your laptop off of a high building, will make it go faster.

MilesAhead · Jul 8, 2023

Ghot said:
As Galileo discovered, at the University of Pisa, in the late 1500s...
...tossing your laptop off of a high building, will make it go faster.

I recommend tossing it edge downwards as an optimization. Neutralizes most of the air resistance.

Almighty1 · Jul 8, 2023

MilesAhead said:
Windows 3.0 running on my 50 Mhz 486 w/16 MB ram was actually Dos 5.x with a 64KB Windows.com shell on top. I know because I installed Dos 5 and then Windows 3.0 over it. If you just installed Windows 3.0 then you did not notice the Dos 5 because it booted into the shell. But because I installed separately my boot manager booted Dos 5. If I wanted to run Windows 3.0 I entered Windows at the command line and up came the Program Manager.

Probably for speed and not using resources on graphical desktops running a single user Linux dedicated to one program, like some scientific research app or something, would be fastest since it would know how to use multi-GB of ram and run on x64 cpus.

Edit: But to TM's point, I used to run Ray Trace Dos programs on this 486 and they usually completed within 90 minutes. Much faster than on Windows 95 on the same machine using the same Ray Tracer ported to Windows.

Everything from Windows/286 and Windows/386 which came before 3.0 and 3.0/3.1/95/98/ME all required DOS booting before Windows just ran on top of it.

MilesAhead · Jul 8, 2023

Almighty1 said:
Everything from Windows/286 and Windows/386 which came before 3.0 and 3.0/3.1/95/98/ME all required DOS booting before Windows just ran on top of it.

Interesting. I did not have experience with those. I remember MS bought SCO Unix that would run on 286. I don't think much came of it. I worked for a while with OS/2 support. It is too bad it suffered from bus wars and PCs not coming with CDROM as standard equipment. You had to shove in a lot of diskettes to install but from CDROM it was a breeze. It did not support all the bus technologies around in the 90s. If it was all PCI like now it probably would have been better received. Also for some unknown reason IBM never sold PCs or PS2s with OS/2 preinstalled to the average consumer. Supposedly Lenovo still tries to get hardware vendors to write OS/2 device drivers. I knew someone who did Lotus Notes for a living. If such jobs still exist I have no way to guess. Perhaps there are some military applications still in use that keep it from disappearing altogether?

Almighty1 · Jul 8, 2023

MilesAhead said:
Interesting. I did not have experience with those. I remember MS bought SCO Unix that would run on 286. I don't think much came of it. I worked for a while with OS/2 support. It is too bad it suffered from bus wars and PCs not coming with CDROM as standard equipment. You had to shove in a lot of diskettes to install but from CDROM it was a breeze. It did not support all the bus technologies around in the 90s. If it was all PCI like now it probably would have been better received. Also for some unknown reason IBM never sold PCs or PS2s with OS/2 preinstalled to the average consumer. Supposedly Lenovo still tries to get hardware vendors to write OS/2 device drivers. I knew someone who did Lotus Notes for a living. If such jobs still exist I have no way to guess. Perhaps there are some military applications still in use that keep it from disappearing altogether?

Before 3.0 was more of a joke since it didn't really do much. Lots of people also used DesqView with QEMM386 from Quarterdeck.

MS introduced their own version of Xenix which was Unix and licensed it from AT&T. SCO later owned the Xenix trademarks.

MilesAhead · Jul 8, 2023

Almighty1 said:
Before 3.0 was more of a joke since it didn't really do much. Lots of people also used DesqView with QEMM386 from Quarterdeck

Yeah, I remember getting a DesqView demo. My brother and I liked to check out the demos like QNX and VM/386. I remember someone telling me at the time that VM/386 ran quite well on a 386 w/4MB ram. A bit of 386 trivia: many people never realized that the 386 was capable of 48 bit addressing. It had a segment descriptor table for 16 bit entries which combined with the 32 bit address yielded a 48 bit address. But after all the Dos segment crap and 4 GB seeming like a large space everyone just set them all to zeroes and used a flat 32 bit address.

Ah the good old days. All this hype about AI recently reminded me that Borland had an AI programming tool called Prolog that did neural nets way back around 1987 or thereabouts. You would think NN were just invented last week! Heh heh

kelper · Jul 8, 2023

I'm not aware of any utility in Windows 11 that will remove erroneous registry keys?

Years ago I used a registry cleaner written by a one-man band and it halved the Windows boot time. The author stated, and I never doubted him, that a Windows fresh install had hundreds of broken links in its registry. This was probably Windows 95.

wimorrison · Jul 8, 2023

This will do everything that is required - and it is free :)

Microsoft PC Manager

RazorKat83 · Jul 8, 2023

pparks1 said:
Generally apps like CCleaner are just providing a 1 place UI to clean up a bunch of things you can clean up on your own , in multiple places, with built-in Windows tools. Overall, I don't think it's a bad application, but I hesitate to run certain parts like the registry cleaners. I think people get it in their heads that if 10/20 registry keys are left behind from an application uninstall, that it's going to really clutter up the registry and make things terrible on their pc. Imagine if you have a pile of dirt on your floor and you are going to use a shovel to scoop it up and throw it out. Let' say that i come by and add an additional 15 grains of sand to that pile, are you going to notice it when you shovel it up and toss it out. To me, that's what cleaning the registry amounts to.

Best advice I can give....don't install stuff that you want to experiment and play with onto your box in the first place. Run a virtual machine and test it out there. Run it on a spare machine you have lying around at home that you feel comfortable formatting and reinstalling from time to time. Install Windows onto a .vhdx file and play with it on this secondary system. All of these things, keep your original machine clean and running great and thus no need to try these other performance improvement tools.

I use CCleaners Registry Cleaner, and it's not once caused me problems. . I don't use it daily or anything. Maybe once a month or so. I just keep the cache, temp files, and prefetch cleaned out and do a System Cleanup through Explorer and that pretty much does everything I need

RazorKat83 · Jul 8, 2023

wimorrison said:
This will do everything that is required - and it is free :)

Microsoft PC Manager

Never heard of this one. Imma give it a try

Edwin · Jul 8, 2023

My Asus VivoBook is going on 3 years old..., I think I've used Disk Cleanup once!
Still operates lightning fast!

Almighty1 · Jul 8, 2023

MilesAhead said:
Yeah, I remember getting a DesqView demo. My brother and I liked to check out the demos like QNX and VM/386. I remember someone telling me at the time that VM/386 ran quite well on a 386 w/4MB ram. A bit of 386 trivia: many people never realized that the 386 was capable of 48 bit addressing. It had a segment descriptor table for 16 bit entries which combined with the 32 bit address yielded a 48 bit address. But after all the Dos segment crap and 4 GB seeming like a large space everyone just set them all to zeroes and used a flat 32 bit address.

Ah the good old days. All this hype about AI recently reminded me that Borland had an AI programming tool called Prolog that did neural nets way back around 1987 or thereabouts. You would think NN were just invented last week! Heh heh

If my memory is correct, Quarterdeck got bought out by Symantec. I still have QNX here, first time I heard about it were some FidoNet BBSes that ran it. QNX basically now is owned by Blackberry but it was the only real-time multi-tasking OS it seems back in those days as it was closer to Unix. I didn't even know what 32bit addressing was in those days. But ofcourse in those days, everything was known as a PC clone or compatible machine as the IBM's were the real thing and then you had Phoenix, AMI and Award BIOS. As for Borland, remembered they had all their Turbo line of programming products.

abactuon · Jul 9, 2023

Almighty1 said:
As for Borland, remembered they had all their Turbo line of programming products.

I liked TopSpeed from JPI/Clarion better.

MilesAhead · Jul 9, 2023

Almighty1 said:
As for Borland, remembered they had all their Turbo line of programming products.

As weird as it sounds I have heard there is still TurboVision programming running on a free Dos somewhere. It was kind of cool. It used the extended ASCII set for single and double lines and corners to make menus and dialog boxes in console mode. There are probably demos or free programs out there. I would think they would run on a Windows command screen but I haven't tried it.

On the IBM thing I remember hearing about the evils of MicroChannel(tm) since it wasn't PC compatible. But the first machine I had to use at IBM was a 16 Mhz 386 PS/2 with 12 MB of ram. The thing actually ran OS/2 2.x pretty well while loaded with layers of networks. One advantage was that OS/2 by default installed a handler for the non-maskable interrupt with a one second alarm. If no interrupts occurred for a full second it would reenable interrupts and show a fault. Kind of like a built in breakout switch. Before OS/2 virtualized the interrupt flags, on a PC you could open debug.com in a Dos box and create a 2 line script that would hard lock the machine. It was:
CLI
JMP $

Turn off interrupts then jump here, which is the line of the jump here instruction. Ok sometimes we had spare time.

MilesAhead · Jul 9, 2023

abactuon said:
I liked TopSpeed from JPI/Clarion better.

I always wanted to try those. Different languages but compiled to compatible object files that could be linked into one program. Yet another case where I could only afford the demo.

abactuon · Jul 11, 2023

I'm interested in what epic software like Asus Armoury Crate or MSI Center is needed for?
I delete it as well as the hidden recovery partition.
I haven't tested how it works, but could it be slowing down the laptop?
Maybe I'm wrong?

Almighty1 · Jul 12, 2023

abactuon said:
I'm interested in what epic software like Asus Armoury Crate or MSI Center is needed for?
I delete it as well as the hidden recovery partition.
I haven't tested how it works, but could it be slowing down the laptop?
Maybe I'm wrong?

Depends on how well they code it as on Dell, they have this thing called Dell Data Vault Collector which I manually stop on each reboot that is known to slow down the system.

Dell Data Vault (DDVDataCollector) High CPU Usage

I have an Inspiron 5584 running Win 10 Pro v20H2. I've recently noticed high CPU usage shortly after boot-up that causes my cooling fan to run for a few minutes, and this CPU activity seems to be associated with the Dell Data Vault (DDV) Collector service. My Windows Services indicate there are...

www.dell.com

The reason I turn things off manually and not permanently is in case I ever want to sell or give the system away, I won't need to figure out what the default settings are.

Speeding up the laptop

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