As discussed in the Forum ( in a post about Remote Access), there’s some actions we can take (I can not list all of them) and that help speeding up Windows.

Physical Disk Speed

When choosing a hard disk for your computer or laptop, think in a long term fashion: you may keep some money in your pocket but you will have to get them out sooner than you think when your slow cheap new disk start struggling under whatever software you use. So spend more money and get a good disk for once.

Disk And File Fragmentation

Every time you delete or move a huge number of files or big files (an old movie or game) think about Defragmentation. Windows Built-in Disk Defragmentation Tool is not there by chance, it is enough to use with normal files; I say normal files because the tool cannot defrag paging file for example or some system files. The tool is available under  :

All Programs/Accessories/System tools

and is called Disk Defragmenter.

A nice method exists to Defragment disks in Command Line mode, using a batch file for example. The command defrag is here to help scripting all drives defragmentation while sleeping or taking a coffee. The help section of this command is clear and command usage is straightforward as discribed bellow :

C:\>defrag /?
Usage:
defrag <volume> [-a] [-f] [-v] [-?]
volume  drive letter or mount point (d: or d:\vol\mountpoint)
-a      Analyze only
-f      Force defragmentation even if free space is low
-v      Verbose output
-?      Display this help text

all you have to do is to replace <volume> by drive name (eg. C:, D:…).

For System and special files, there is many tools available to buy on the net.

Paging File aka Pagefile.sys

Paging file (or swap file) helps the Operating System to run more programs than what would only physical RAM do. It is a partition of the Disk (generally for Unix Like systems), or a file constructed in a particular way (possible for both Windows and Linux). All known Operating System need a paging space; an exception are the “Live” Systems, that run in available RAM and may not need to swap.

For Windows, the size of the Pagefile.sys file is automatically set and the default location is the system drive. Here, at Windows Setup time or after, it is recommended to create a dedicated drive to host the paging file, so that the heavy I/O load does not affect neither Windows itself nor any running application. For the size of the Pagefile.sys, it is linked to physical memory size and in general 1,5 to 2 times bigger. An easy way to decide is by checking the recommended size calculated by Windows as described in the following animation :

You may have noticed that you can have more than one paging file.

You’ll have to reboot after changing paging file size or location.

Software’s Setup Folder

You should never install softwares using Disk I/O heavily on the same drive as Windows. For example, if you need to install an SGBD (Oracle, SQL server,MySql…etc), do not install it in system drive, performances will be impacted on both Windows and Software sides.

Same thing if we talk about any software which uses disk to cache temporary files to speedup its utilization. As example, Photoshop uses caching to make things go fast, and fortunately, it offers the posibility to define cache folder location.

Windows System Memory Locks

A great TIP by user Aicha in the same post in the forum talked about sizing Windows System Cache depending on physical memory size. I didn’t give it a try, but comments are open to you for feedbacks.

The configuration involves registry modification so please make sure you set configuration correctly, I’ll recommend making a backup before going any further.

So, here is the receip :

open Registry Editor by using “regedit” command

Browse to key : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Session Manager\Memory Management

Edit (or create) the DWORD Value IoPageLockLimit

Enter the Decimal value 983040

If you have 2Gb of physical memory you may double this size. In fact, there’s rules to decide what to put as value : please refer to the following Microsoft Technet article for more details.

You may need to reboot.

Hope you found this interesting and I’d like to thank you for your time.

Dans cet article je vais vous présenter la procédure pour augmenter la taille du disque (qui correspond au lecteur système C:) d’une machine virtuelle Windows 2003 standard sous VMWare Workstation.

La procédure est la suivante :

1. étendre le fichier vmdk qui correspond au disque en question
2. montrer qu’il n’est pas possible d’utiliser la commande diskpart pour étendre le disque sous Windows
3. utiliser gparted live CD pour répondre à ce besoin
4. constater le résultat

J’utiliserai une fenêtre de commande DOS sous le PC physique hostant VMWare Workstation et la console vmware durant cette session comme présenté dans l’image ci-dessous

espace de travaille pour cette manip

Avant de passer à la manipulation, je vais parler de gparted. Gparted est un acronyme pour Gnome PARTition EDitor, il permet l’édition de la table des partitions sur un disque ce qui est normalement irréalisable directement. Biensur il y a plusieurs produits qui font la même tâche et peut être qui sont plus conviviaux dans leur utilisation, mais l’avantage de Gparted c’est qu’il est sous licence GPL, General Public Licence, et donc libre d’utilisation. L’image du CD Live peut être téléchargée sur le grand sourceforge; vous trouverez par ailleurs d’autres formats disponibles (USB, exe…etc.).

Sans plus tarder, le vidéo ci-dessous résume toute l’opération, bonne visualisation.

J’espère que vous avez apprécié la visualisation de la vidéo. Je reprends ici la commande VMWare pour étendre un disk disk001.vmdk à 10Gb

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 10Gb “H:\virtual-disks1\disk001.vmdk”

à noter que pour VMWare ESX, la commande devient:

[root@esxsrv1 ~]#vmkfstools -X10Gb /path/to/disk001.vmdk

Dans un article prochain je vous parlerai de ce scénario.

Obtenez la version HD du vidéo sur simple coup de fil ou par Paypal.

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Pour connaître notre solution de micro paiement : Allopass

Merci pour votre temps et bonne lecture.