About performance boosters

Pretty much from the moment, personal computers go into our lives we see a specific type of programs that claim that they will improve performance. Modern versions of these programs promise to have more free memory, registry cleaner, and performance optimizations.

So far I haven’t seen any such program that does anything good. Moreover, most of them do bad things that look like good things. Let’s start with programs that make more free memory.

If you open Task Manager and then go to the “Performance” tab you will see “Free” or “Available” memory. And after you run a program that promises to free more memory, you will see that this number increases. Sometimes it increases by a lot. As a result, you may think that it is a good thing. There more free memory the better, right? But in fact, it is quite the opposite.

What these kinds of applications do is just purge everything from memory. As a result, when you switch to some application, pages of its working set will be removed from memory and the application will have to load them again from executable files or from the page file. And you see long delays when you work with this application until it loads all purged pages back.

The next thing, it will purge all caches. You see there is no point in having free memory just stay there and do nothing. There is much more sense to use it and to cache something not important. If somebody will need this memory, then it will be given to them almost immediately. A good example of such caching the files you opened last. This way, if you need something again, it is there, ready instantly.

But after everything is purged, all you have is useless free memory. Moreover, you will see that over time Windows will populate this memory very quickly. The worst kind of such applications do it constantly in the background and as a result, they are seriously hurting the performance of your system.

The next kind of such applications are registry cleaners. They claimed that they would clean unused entries in the registry and the registry would be smaller. As a result, you will see performance improvements.

However, the main issue with this approach is that nobody knows which entries are useless and which are safe to delete. For example, there could be an empty registry key but it may serve as some kind of marker and if you remove it, some applications may stop working or work differently.

Another example are COM entries. Sometimes you will see entries that are clearly wrong. But even these wrong entries still work because it is some kind of obsolete form that Microsoft supports for compatibility.

Lastly, the size of the registry does not matter at all. Windows loads necessary chunks to memory and modern computers typically have a lot of memory. As a result, usually, it is not a problem at all.

But you can have a lot of problems in the future, especially if you didn’t run all your applications after such cleanup. You may even forget about cleanup. And then something will stop working and you blame Microsoft and Bill Gates, but in fact, you did it.

I did a lot of experiments in the past and I didn’t see any improvements. But I had a lot of problems and wasted so much time fixing them, that even if I would see improvements it would not be worth it at all.

And the last kind of such programs are optimizers. They claimed that tuned some hidden Windows settings to improve performance. Theoretically, this can yield some improvements but in my practice at best this kind of applications does nothing. They change settings that have no effect on the modern version of Windows.

In the worst case, they change the behavior of Windows. I need to explain this in more detail. As you can imagine, Windows has quite a lot of settings and there are millions or perhaps billions of different combinations of settings. As you can imagine, even huge corporations such as Microsoft cannot check all of them. As a result, they regularly check the most common ones.

But there are a lot of settings for some corner cases or to address some specific needs of some big customer. And some of these settings have already been forgotten and nobody needs them anymore but they are still there. But nobody was testing them for years.

Then some developer found such a setting and evaluated what this setting does based on its name and the internet. And if it sounds like a good idea then they will add it to their application. It may even show improvements on the developer's PC.

Later, somebody downloads this app and enables this setting. But on their PC and Windows, this setting does not work as intended and creates a lot of issues because nobody used this setting for a very long time.

It is exactly the same reason I always recommend installing only the English version of Windows. It is the version that tested the most and it is what Microsoft uses internally. And the less setting you change the better.

In conclusion, most of such applications will not do you any good. If there were some things that can improve the performance of your system, then Microsoft would incorporate them a long time ago. Ans because Microsoft didn’t do them means that there are no performance improvements or perhaps improvements are very small.

But even if you will see some performance improvements most likely you will have problems too. And then you will spend hours investigating why some applications stopped working. It is totally not worth it.

I hope it helps someone.