Windows 7 Desktop Tuning Quick Reference
Another item that kicked me a bit in the VCAP-DTA exam (as per the RADIUS post below) was tuning the Windows 7 desktop image for VDI. I mean, that could be a million settings, couldn’t it? Where do you start? You could take the whole of the three hours of the exam tweaking and changing! While going through a View best practices white paper for another piece of work that I’m doing, I came across a handy chart for a handful of basic items you should tune on your Windows 7 desktop, which is a damn sight easier than remembering hundreds of registry keys and group policy settings!
| PARAMETER | CONFIGURATION |
| vCPU | 1 for WinXP and Win7 and Win8
2 for multimedia intensive apps |
| Memory | 512-768 MB for WinXP
1GB for 32-bit Win7 and Win82GB for 64-bit Win7 and Win8 3GB for Win7 and Win8 64-bit for memory-intensive apps |
| Network adapter | VMXnet3, flexible |
| Storage adapter | PVSCSI or LSI Logic SAS |
| VMware Tools | Latest installed |
| Visual settings | “Adjust to best performance”
Disable Animations for Windows Maximize and Minimize operations Use default cursor for busy and working cursor |
| Disable services | Windows Update, Super-fetch, Windows Index |
| Group policy settings | Disable Hibernation
Screensaver to None |
| Other settings | Turn off clear-type
Disable fading effectsDisable auto-play and external drive caching for quick release Disable last access timestamps (1) |
1) Set the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/Filesystem/
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate to 1
Blue Clouds 