OK. Honeymoon is over. I have been experiencing some degradation in performance/responsiveness recently, so started looking for optimizations which have had a positive result.
Here is what I have done:
- Set any non-essential services to "Manual" and stop them. This has been somewhat of a trial and error exercise, but I've been able to free up some memory and CPU utilization in the process.
- Adjust Visual Effects for Best Performance. This can be accomplished by going to to System Settings->Advanced ->Performance Tab->Settings Button-> Visual Effects. The only visual effect that I couldn't live without was smooth fonts, so I turned it on.
- Uninstalled Trillian. This thing does not seem to play well with Windows Server 2008 64-bit as it was constantly churning CPU and memory. I noticed a marked improvement in CPU utilization when I turned it off, and have since removed it thanks to this post which pointed me to a previous version of Windows Live Messenger which installed just fine.
- I also enabled "Superfetch" per this post.
I am also finding that my USB 2.0 hardrive is becoming a bottleneck since I use it to store all of my VHD files. I might go out and get an ESATA drive this weekend and see if I notice a difference.
I will report back in a few days with an update.