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visual-studio-2008performancewindows-vista

How do I speed up Windows Vista 64 for use with Visual Studio 2008?


I am aware that I may be asking this in the wrong place. If so, mods - please point me in the right direction.

Anyway, I'm sure that you guys have faced this problem. I have 6 gigs of RAM and VS makes my machine crawl. This doesn't always happen. I've made sure that no other major, non-required processes are running other than a Chrome window, VS 2008 and occasionally Reflector.

I have Resharper installed, and I've turned off the Solution-wide analysis. I have one solution open.

This issue is really killing my productivity. It takes up to a minute to switch files.

EDIT: I have about fifteen projects in the current solution but no more than six are loaded at a time. I am running the most updated version of VS2008


Solution

  • You don't really say what exactly is crawling.

    I would guess it is disk access causing the problem. If you happen to be using a laptop with a power-saving 5,400 RPM disk then it's almost certainly the problem. Those drives suck. A lot.

    Snowbear had a good suggestion of using a RAM drive for your files. The tricky part is remembering to always copy your changes to hard disk.

    Another good idea is using an SSD drive. A second good idea is RAID-0 hard disks, either Western Digital Velociraptors or SCSI 15k's.

    Upgrading your hard disks won't just speed up Visual Studio. It'll make a difference to your whole computer experience. I really recommend the SSD option.