Some Notes on the Machines

A registry entry:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" /v SeparateProcess /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

which can be set up in group policy, under Computer Configuration, Preferences, Windows Settings, Registry.

This will make any Windows 10 machine run much faster, at the cost of the fancy Cortana query and search component.

1. In REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Software, Policies, Microsoft, Windows.
2. Create key “Windows Search” no quotes.
3. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortana” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
4. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortanaAboveLock” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
5. Create DWORD32 “DisableWebSearch” no quotes. Make sure the value is one (1).
6. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWeb” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
7. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWebOverMeteredConnections” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
8. Reboot.

Very interesting, not tested by this writer yet; appears to be able to handle registry to some extent. One can turn off creation of new 8.3 filenames, and one can also strip existing 8.3 filenames from a filesystem and from the registry:

https://ss64.com/nt/fsutil.html

This tool decommissions quite the list of Windows 7 through 10 telemetry inclusions by which Microsoft informs itself of our behavior, using quite a lot of our RAM, CPU, and bandwidth in so doing.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Brought to this forefront by the Beard, Mike Hunsinger.

Found this today.

• A two-month-old laptop with a SanDisk SD8SN8U-256G-1006 SSD for its C: drive, Windows 10.
• Windows had recognized the drive as a standard hard drive, not an SSD, and the laptop had slowed down a lot very recently.
• Installed the SanDisk SSD Dashboard, ran TRIM, and scheduled weekly TRIM operations.
• Laptop much faster.

One can save a lot of data confusion and server-side load, by turning off share caching on the server side. This prevent client machines from using Offline Files to drive human beings up the wall! :-)

TOSC.VBS turns off share caching on all of the shares it can, except for dollar shares. It needs to be run as administrator.

This can help a lot:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SearchUI.exe Telemetry" dir=out action=block program="%SystemRoot%\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy\SearchUI.exe" description="This rule prevents the Cortana telemetry. (This will also disable Cortana voice recognition.)"

Some very interesting data:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/networking/technologies/network-subsystem/net-sub-performance-tuning-nics

If your software is all new, let’s say 2013 and after, it probably makes sense to disable 8.3 filename generation, for a nice kick of speed.

To do it once for all drives, just do this:

fsutil behavior set Disable8dot3 1

If you want to do it for one select drive, say E:, first do a registry edit in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

you’ll want to change NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 2. Then you will need to reboot, and in an administrative command prompt:

fsutil behavior set E: 1

and reboot again, and it’s done.

Prioritizing certain kinds of data, can help a lot in general on Linux. Here’s the FireQOS configuration I just set up on this 802.11g-wireless laptop:

DEVICE=wlan0
INPUT_SPEED=54000kbit
OUTPUT_SPEED=54000kbit
LINKTYPE="ethernet"
interface $DEVICE world-in input rate $INPUT_SPEED
interface $DEVICE world-out output rate $OUTPUT_SPEED

interface $DEVICE world-in input rate $INPUT_SPEED $LINKTYPE balanced
	class priority commit 10%
		match tcp port 22,3389,53,444  # SSH, RDP, DNS, SSL VPN
		match proto GRE
		match icmp
		match tcp syn
		match tcp ack

interface $DEVICE world-out output rate $OUTPUT_SPEED $LINKTYPE balanced
	class priority commit 10%
		match tcp port 22,3389,53,444
		match proto GRE
		match icmp
		match tcp syn
		match tcp ack