After a good 8Hrs this weekend I feel like the greasy garage mechanic who is tweaking his vintage camaro for that extra 20-30 horsepower. His efforts may seem a big waste of time to most but, when he gets on the road white-smoking his tires with a roaring engine he knows that his “tinkering” was worthwhile.
Welcome to the nerd version of the same. It seems that “everyone” has a how to make Windows XP better as a VDI desktop tips. In fact it also seems that they don’t all have the same “tips” in each document. I have read through every one I could find line-by-line and compiled a Windows 7 list. This is, of course, specific to VMware View 4.5 when Windows 7 will be fully supported.
So without further introduction here is my list!
- Create VM
- Attach drive to another VM and create a disk partition that it is aligned. Yes still do this if you are using NFS. Storage VMotion and proper tiering mean we need to plan on the VM being different places. (don’t format or anything else just use diskpart to create the volume)
- Diskpart select disk 1
- Diskpart create partition align=64
- Set Virtual Video Card RAM to 128Meg (edit the properties of the VM)
- Install Windows
- Install VMware Tools
- Install All Windows Updates
- Then Set Windows Updates to NOT check for updates
- Join to Domain
- Install VMware View Agent
- Configure the default color setting for RDP by making the following change in the registry:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp – Change the color depth to 4
- Disable COM and LPT ports (In VM)
- Set Backgroup to Solid Color
- Set Screen Saver to None
- Set Sounds to No Sounds
- Set to Windows 7 Basic Theme
- Uninstall Tablet PC Components (unless needed)
- Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP
- Disable IPv6 unless needed
- Open Windows Media Player and use default settings
- Open IE8 and do not use “suggested sites”
- Set home page to internal website or bing or google (something light)
- Change IE to prevent programs from suggesting a change of the search provider
- remove Webslice gallery and suggested sites from Toolbars on IE
- Install Adobe Flash Player
- Install Adobe Reader (update to latest from within app) then set to “Do not download or install updates automatically)
- Install Microsoft Silverlight
- Turn off Messages about Virus protection if using floating desktops
- Turn Automatic Computer Maintenance off
- Disable Allow users to browse for troubleshooters
- Disable Allow troubleshooting to begin immediately when started
- Change Visual Effects to Adjust for best performance
- Change power settings to High performance with no sleep timer
- Right click on C:\ Drive and Disable Indexing “allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties” Do all folders and sub folder
- Turn off System Protection on C:\
- run msconfig.exe
- set no GUI boot Set Base Video on
- under startup disable Adobe Acrobat and Reader
- At the command line enter the following: fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1 (Requires reboot)
- Find the Disk TimeOutValue by following the path [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk]
- Change the key “TimeOutValue”=REG_DWORD:0x000000be(190)
- Run Disk Clean up and remove everything you can
- Run defragmentation and turn off defragmentation schedule
- Delete all events logs.
- Disable the Windows Firewall (only for floating desktops)
- Make sure to Activate Windows Online or you will get an error (16) with no detail as to what is the problem really is in the view console
Yes, you are right I did not go into the click here do this and tell you were everything is. If you can make these changes (or some of them) via Group policy applied to the computer object that is a great thing. I just happen to know how technical my readers are and how offended they would be if I were to oversimplify.
I really want to add to this items that I have missed. I know there have to be a few. So I welcome feedback, questions, comments or disagreements as to the content.
Let Creedom Ring!
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Do you still need to align Windows 7 disk partitions? I know that Server 2008 does this automatically know and I thought Windows 7 did as well.
Great list of tips, thanks.
Another way to gain more bang for your buck would be to use RES PowerFuse – http://www.ressoftware.com – which optimises everything.
How well it would work in View I’ve yet to find out
I expect it would perform great.
@stefanjagger
Windows 7 is indeed properly aligned out of the box.
I can’t seem to find a technet article to back this up, so you will just have to trust me.
Or you could build a Windows 7 vm without touching the disk first, you’ll see the 1MB partition alignment.
how about things like superfetch, I would think that they could/would cause an issue in an over-commit situation, right?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Kaplan, VMware View, Jason Langone, Christopher Reed, RobB and others. RobB said: RT @vmwareview: RT @Creedom2020: New Post: Tune up #Windows 7 for #VDI (#VMwareView 4.5) – http://www.creedtek.com/?p=37 [...]
You have tested it and writing form your personal experience or you find some information online?
Turn off hibernation with this command:
powercfg -h off
A VMware Engineer told me setting the Virtual Video Card RAM to 128Meg is useless, as the View Manager sets it on the fly to what it thinks it should be. Anyone know if that’s true? Anyone know how to verify what the virtual card memory is from within a VM?
In the Release Notes for View Manger 4:
http://www.vmware.com/support/view40/doc/releasenotes_viewmanager40.html
It says: “Do not set the video RAM size to greater than 30MB. If you do, vMotion will fail.”
Thats’s a little different the the suggestion on this page to “Set Virtual Video Card RAM to 128Meg”
Any thoughts on that? Has anyone experience problems with the higher Video Card RAM?
I’m pretty much impressed with the stability of Windows 7. It is better than windows Vista which hogs my memory and cpu.;;.
That has not been my experience. Many deployments out there setup with 128Meg at this point.
It is able standards. Yes changing it in View will adjust that setting. I just don’t want to take chances.
A VMware Engineer told me setting the Virtual Video Card RAM to 128Meg is useless, as the View Manager sets it on the fly to what it thinks it should be. Anyone know if that’s true? Anyone know how to verify what the virtual card memory is from within a VM?
how about things like superfetch, I would think that they could/would cause an issue in an over-commit situation, right?
Turn off hibernation with this command:
powercfg -h off
You have tested it and writing form your personal experience or you find some information online?
Windows 7 does not need to be aligned as described in this article. It properly aligns the partitions by creating a starting offset of 1,048,576 bytes (1 MB). This offset will properly align any underlying storage stripe size of up to 1 MB.
Great post! and thank you!
I followed your guide and also disabled some none essential windows services.
In my tests however i found that PCoIP was not working i was able to solve my issues once i re enabled no gui boot and base vga which in your guide i had checked.
Once i did this and re-installed the Vmware VGA II driver PCoIP was happy again.
Cheers!
These tips are so true