The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
Welcome to The SSD Review and congratulations on finding the internet’s most sought after resource in the optimization of Windows 7, The Windows 7 Optimization Guide.
The Windows 7 Optimization Guide consists of several optimizations that will increase the performance of your Windows 7 environment, these ranging from very simple to somewhat advanced in nature. All optimizations have been laid out in a very easily understandable format, and many with detailed explanations as to reasoning for that ‘tweak’.
PREFACE
To start, there is absolutely no need to optimize Windows 7 as it is an excellent operating system straight out of the package. Having said that, there are a number of ‘tips and tricks’ that will help you along in fine tuning your Windows 7 installation. Many of these range from very simple to complex and we have attempted to lay each out in a fashion that is easily understandable to all.
The Windows 7 Optimization Guide is dedicated to those of us who get stuck and continue trying to solve a problem, only to realize at 3:30am that they have to be up for work in an hour or so.
RELEASE OF LIABILITY
Before going any further, we think it is fair to advise that there is no need to optimize your computer, once you have installed Windows 7 and you will still realize an amazing performance increase from your previous OS. Although we have done our best to explain our optimization choices and the procedure for each, following any of the optimizations listed is of your own choice and we cannot be held responsible for any system problems or damage that may occur to your computer.
Optimizations range from extremely simple to rather complicated where the reader is shown methods of altering their systems registry and, unfortunately, we haven’t all the same skill level to perform all optimizations. If you choose to complete the optimizations, please be careful and follow this Guide exactly.
Last but not least, the following optimizations have been proven to significantly increase the performance of an OS and many have returned with words of thanks which may attest to the Guides success.
FAILSAFE
Should you make a mistake, we have found that there are four escapes to any mistake made as a result of trying these tweaks:
- Call on the experience of the site and members who have been through similar ordeals and have the knowledge and background to assist;
- Reboot your computer while quickly tapping F8. This will bring you into the Advanced Boot Options where you can select options such as ‘Repair Your Computer’, ‘Last Known Good Configuration’ or booting into ‘Safe Mode’ where you can do a ‘System Restore’ to an earlier time;
- Reboot your computer with your Windows 7 disk in the drive. Boot to the disk select the installation you want and then click on ‘repair’; or
- Complete a clean install of Windows 7 which, although time intensive, will confirm that your problem is solved and the system is in tip-top shape.
Our website contains a SSD Forum Page with some of the greatest computer minds in the business. One of the most important things one can do before starting this process is to register and know that our team is there should the unexpected occur.
Very comprehensive! Much more so then the posting at notebookreview.
Thank you very much!
Don’t change the boot options. Windows by default will use all the CPUs for booting. If you do change the number of cpus you will have a problem where one of the system files is destroyed and you won’t be able to go back to a normal boot sequence. The solution is to repair your OS installation.
Since I started using windows7, I’ve always wondered “How many different commands like “CMD & msconfig” typed in search box would bear fruit. I just read this article and immediately created the GOD Folder but haven’t even opened it yet. I wanted to thank you first. Thank you !!!
Question ” Why didn’t MS do that?
This was a great article
Very impressive guide to manage windows 7. The article makes u feel like an administrator.Thankss……….
May I suggest MSE over AVG, You dont have to register and AVG has had well publicised cases of false positives including one which was an essential windows file. MSE also has a low footprint.
MSE is exactly as you say, however having used just about everyone out there at length, my support for AVG is solid as that’s the one I have returned to time after time and use on all my systems today.
A great site. I can see the painstaking approach towards this compilation. It has sure worked for me.
really I am glad , its a great site to resolve our basic problem . and i learn lots of things about my operating system
You have a typo in “Two seconds would be 3000;”. Thank you for great tips! God mode and some new Win key hotkeys were new to me. You can add Win+Pause to hotkeys, as you have mentioned it earlier.
“Remove unused fonts” can return at you later on. I could not run toolset to Nwn2 (some years ago) because I did not have the right font for it. It was very hard to guess what the problem was. It happened after I deleted some of fonts and I fixed the problem (after many hours of googling for problem I did not understand) when I downloaded needed font.
I don’t advice deleting fonts.
Thank you for you input Dawe. Appreciated.
EXCELLENT……….I can now be a win7 pro……….lol Thanks
Hi Les, Thanks so much for sharing this! As you say, Tweaking is not mandatory. But so satisfactory! Thanks!
Thanks for all the awesome little tips. Did it on a New SSD laptop (install from scratch) and tradtional HDD desktop to make it run a bit faster.
Always can find something new to squeeze that last ounce of performance out of you RIG!
VLC is a big piece of shit. Pot player is way better, being able to read 10bit encoded files and using hardware acceleration by default without any settings to do.
With respect to: Speed Up Menu Appearance Time- Please tell people not to set this number below 500. Doing so will cause several problems that are not obviously related to this setting.
I have up to 8 processors in advanced options in msconfig, is it recommended?
You might go yo our Forum page with this and clarify. It is hard to address such without a better background.
Are there any of these that i can do which are not risky?
Great site for bookmarking
Good site to pass on and share as well…
Left Click on the Orb, Control Panel and then System;
Instead of this try windows key and the break key( /pause … if you still have one! ) at the same time to go straight to system
there is a mnemonic I use: ‘Windows refueled’ because each character can be used with the windows key i.e. Windows + d = desktop
desktop is also available from the taskbar at the far right by clicking the little parallelogram
Following this guide… fry’d my x16 SLI video port. I thought at first it had fried my $350 660 TI video card. Bioshock infinite could not allocate textures correctly… and I tried to find the right settings but, it was too late. now I have to use my x8 SLI port. DO NOT FOLLOW this guide if you play games.
Sorry for your circumstance, however, nothing in this guide could have caused your issues. The Guide has been the most popular on the internet since 2010 and you are the first to experience such, out of tons of gamers as well.
Well I appreciate that. I should not word it as I have. I do not know that it was your guide that did the damage. The more I understand the problem… the more I don’t know what actually caused it. I wrote this in anger because I had a 120 gig OCZ that played the game fine. All I did was upgrade it to a 3 times faster Samsung 840 250 gig. So the only thing I did different in the installs… is this guide. So I blamed the guide… but, in actuality… it is most likely something in the settings, is not getting set right. I have tried all of the ones I could find and I can not get Bioshock Infinite to play now without the textures all coming apart. Very wierd. But, I have since read a guide on Anandtech.com which says there is now no reason for any of these settings because SSDs have been improved and Windows 7 handles the job just fine. But, please do not take my word, I am just a novice gamer, that knows just enough to burn up a video port… hahahaha. He did warned that doing this can make some software not function correctly. So, once again I appologize for flaming you.
Likewise, I believe our first page also states that optimization is not necessary. Hopefully you get things all fixed up.
GOD MODE is the best yet in tricks and short cuts.
Also, for those that use DiskPart and PowerCFG, etc. (system programs), open a CMD prompt with admin’ rights, type in the program name and Help and redirect to a text file so you have a full command reference for that system program.
Example:
PowerCFG /help >PowerCFG.txt
hi great guide i am fan of computer electronics myself. I have question about windows 7. I wanted to install clean installation of win 7 on my father laptop but i dont have windows 7 installation disk. the recovery system is hidden on the recovery partition and its full of useless apps. the question is how to make windows 7 dvd out of the recovery partition, is it possible.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c0e78d7a-883d-4caa-a8c0-1e127a14612a/windows-7-home-premium-download?forum=w7itproinstall
Not that I am aware of.
Just a note on the pagefile; if the pagefile is disabled completely on the C: drive the system will not generate crashdumps. The pagefile must be as large as the system memory for the system memory dump to generate. I leave it up to user preference whether system dumps should be saved. I prefer it myself, but I think being aware of the effects of disabling the pagefile are more valuable than memory dumps themselves.
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2860880
Where did the Windows 7 optimization guide go? I can’t access to it anymore, I only can see two pages. Please, fix!
This is the same as it has been for years…also is here:
https://myw7blog.blogspot.ca/
Yes, but what I meant is, when I click on “Guides -> Windows 7 Optimization” (before that happened it gave me the guide with the 5/6 pages with all the screenshots that were used in the guide). Now, I can see only 1/2 pages, and if I click on 1, it will get back to 2. and there are no screenshots. The same happens in normal mode and incognito mode. Do you have the guide in .pdf format?
Sorry not for this guide.
Atleast can it be restored?
I am sorry but it has not changed… We have a copy on the site and it is the same.
Then if it has not changed why I can’t see it?
I don’t know what you believe you previously saw but that is the same as it has always been.
This is what I see:
1: https://i.imgur.com/3H9Lhbo.png
2: https://i.imgur.com/nwSDyqC.png
As you can see, I can’t see the other pages.
I can’t answer for what you see but P2 has all the information when the article is opened.
That’s really odd, well, thanks for the help man! Keep up with the guides!
This is an excellent article; I like the way you present these actions with pros and cons and let the reader decide. I stumbled on your Windows 8 Optimization Guide today after previously using this Windows 7 Optimization Guide. I did not buy into all of your corrections but I must say that the changes I made to my two Windows 7 systems, one HDD and the other SSD, have resulted in significant improvements to both. I should mention that the Windows 8 Guide also applies to Windows 7.
Jim