I recently read a helpful article in the July/August edition of Code magazine that pointed out several things you could do to tune up developer workstation. To get more performance you could obviously boost your RAM, CPU, or hard drive ... but this article mainly focused on what Visual Studio and .NET do to your computer, and how you can do some simple file system clean-up to boost the performance of your machine. It also included a few general tips for tweaking visual effects and OS-level stuff to free up more processing power and memory. Here is a cliff-notes version of what I took away from the article of cleanup tasks to perform in Windows Vista:
Hard Drive Elements
- Delete all files and subfolders from the directories below (if you use IIS for ASP.NET development you should run the "iisreset" command first so it will release the files so you can delete them):
- <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
- <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
- <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
- <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Backup Files
- Run "Disk Cleanup" utility at least once a month (this takes care of a long list of miscellaneous directories and file types that can be safely deleted)
- If you have ever created any additional users on your computer and they no longer use your computer, you should delete their subfolder under <sysdrive>:\Users
- After you have completed the tasks above, defragment your hard drive.
Visual Effects
- Make sure you have configured settings for "best performance" ... who needs all that animated fading, sliding, translucent fluff anyway?
- Change your color scheme to Windows Vista Basic (Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization > Window Color and Appearance)
- If you have a background picture on your desktop or have the gadget sidebar enabled, you should consider removing them. Both take up memory and make screen refreshes much slower.
Operating System
- There are probably a ton of services running in the background that are not needed for most of your day-to-day tasks, but were either turned on when the OS was installed or when you installed a certain program. Try turning off as many services as you can, but keep a list of the items you turned off ... so when something doesn't work like it used to, you can go back and turn a particular service back on. One tool you can use to easily set which services should be running is "System Configuration", which you can get to by running "msconfig".
Here is a link to the full article by Paul Sheriff: http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0907031