Who's upgrading from Surface RT to Surface 2?

[Szadzik]

I'm not... here's why:
[video=youtube;KxTM4Ex4y94]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxTM4Ex4y94[/video]
This is a short video of my tweaked Surface RT (running 8.1 RTM) opening Office RT apps. In the background is a video that someone took at a Microsoft Store of the performance of the Surface 2 opening Office RT apps.

I'm delighted with the new performance of the RT.

You are forgetting about how many people play with the store units and how many things can go wrong because of that.

 

[WillysJeepMan]

Thanks for the video. Very interesting. Aside from running 8.1, what other "tweaks" did you make to your RT, if you don't mind my asking?

I performed the following tweaks. I didn't come up with them, I saw them in various threads on XDA-developers forum.

Reduce Touchscreen lag

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” SOFTWARE/Microsoft/TouchPrediction
3. Double click on “Latency” and change the Value Data from 8 to 2.
4. Double click on “Sample Time” and change that Value Data from 8 to 2.

Disable SuperFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: services.msc
2. In the Services panel, locate "Superfetch" and change it from "Automatic" to "Disable"

Disable PreFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
3. Double click on “Enable Prefetcher” and change the Value Data from 3 to 0.

Reboot the system

 

[WillysJeepMan]

You are forgetting about how many people play with the store units and how many things can go wrong because of that.

I'm not forgetting anything. YOU are assuming that the Surface 2 wasn't rebooted.

 

[oion]

So basically, all the same tweaks on the RT v1 can be performed on the RT v2, which in the store would be untweaked, hence a tweaked RT v2 should still be faster by base hardware spec. That's all good.

 

[kristalsoldier]

I performed the following tweaks. I didn't come up with them, I saw them in various threads on XDA-developers forum.

Reduce Touchscreen lag

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” SOFTWARE/Microsoft/TouchPrediction
3. Double click on “Latency” and change the Value Data from 8 to 2.
4. Double click on “Sample Time” and change that Value Data from 8 to 2.

Disable SuperFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: services.msc
2. In the Services panel, locate "Superfetch" and change it from "Automatic" to "Disable"

Disable PreFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
3. Double click on “Enable Prefetcher” and change the Value Data from 3 to 0.

Reboot the system

Thanks.

 

[Omni]

I performed the following tweaks. I didn't come up with them, I saw them in various threads on XDA-developers forum.

Reduce Touchscreen lag

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” SOFTWARE/Microsoft/TouchPrediction
3. Double click on “Latency” and change the Value Data from 8 to 2.
4. Double click on “Sample Time” and change that Value Data from 8 to 2.

Disable SuperFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: services.msc
2. In the Services panel, locate "Superfetch" and change it from "Automatic" to "Disable"

Disable PreFetch

1. Press Windows-R, and type: regedit
2. In the registry editor locate: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
3. Double click on “Enable Prefetcher” and change the Value Data from 3 to 0.

Reboot the system

Have you noticed much difference? Ive read about doing that before but never thought performance was bad enough for me to bother.

 

[WillysJeepMan]

So basically, all the same tweaks on the RT v1 can be performed on the RT v2, which in the store would be untweaked, hence a tweaked RT v2 should still be faster by base hardware spec. That's all good.

Yes, I think that is a reasonable conclusion to draw.

For those wondering, my purpose for the comparison wasn't to make some oddball claim that the RT is as fast as the Surface 2. On another forum, where the original Surface 2 performance video was posted, the responses were unanimously raving about the performance they observed in that video. It turns out that by applying the tweaks that I've posted, a Surface RT can demonstrate similar performance. So, logically speaking, if one is excited by the Surface 2 performance (untweaked), then they should be pleased with the performance of a (tweaked) Surface RT.

That's generally speaking... without a doubt there are aspects of the RT that will never be as fast as the S2 simply because of the hardware differences.

 

[demandarin]

@Kristal let me know if you apply these tweaks and its a noticeable improvement

@willie any drawbacks to those tweaks?

 

[kristalsoldier]

@Kristal let me know if you apply these tweaks and its a noticeable improvement

@willie any drawbacks to those tweaks?

Will do, but only after I upgrade from 8 to 8.1 when the final public version is released, which is when I will also try out these tweaks.

 

[oion]

Some reading about prefetch/superfetch:
Disable Superfetch & Prefetch for SSD in Windows 8 | 7
Why does Windows 8 not automatically disable Superfetch on SSD?
Windows 7/8 SSD Optimization (discussion, especially starting at Enigma's post)

The long and short of it is... Win7 and Win8 automatically detects an SSD in use and all of those prefetch/superfetch/defrag systems should be automatically optimized (i.e. SSD ignored for certain functions). So you can disable those things, but with Win8 being as "smart" as it's supposed to be, you won't see any additional performance gain.

SSDs have improved markedly since they first came to market; I remember those days, sort of. Read/write life should surpass the normal lifespan of SSD-based devices (yes, Surface) even by my standards. The touchscreen lag tweak looks a lot more useful, though I never bothered to tweak my RT.


Edit to add: I spotted this about the touchscreen tweak. http://www.geek.com/microsoft/how-t...rosoft-surface-rt-with-a-simple-hack-1536045/ The conclusion is interesting. Like I said, though, I never bothered to tweak my RT, as it's really fast enough for me (from a practical standpoint, though, being able to resell v1 at a higher rate now than a year from now is one reason why I'm upgrading).

 

[demandarin]

Some reading about prefetch/superfetch:
Disable Superfetch & Prefetch for SSD in Windows 8 | 7
Why does Windows 8 not automatically disable Superfetch on SSD?
Windows 7/8 SSD Optimization (discussion, especially starting at Enigma's post)

The long and short of it is... Win7 and Win8 automatically detects an SSD in use and all of those prefetch/superfetch/defrag systems should be automatically optimized (i.e. SSD ignored for certain functions). So you can disable those things, but with Win8 being as "smart" as it's supposed to be, you won't see any additional performance gain.

SSDs have improved markedly since they first came to market; I remember those days, sort of. Read/write life should surpass the normal lifespan of SSD-based devices (yes, Surface) even by my standards. The touchscreen lag tweak looks a lot more useful, though I never bothered to tweak my RT.


Edit to add: I spotted this about the touchscreen tweak. How to remove touchscreen lag on Microsoft Surface RT with a simple hack | Microsoft | Geek.com The conclusion is interesting. Like I said, though, I never bothered to tweak my RT, as it's really fast enough for me (from a practical standpoint, though, being able to resell v1 at a higher rate now than a year from now is one reason why I'm upgrading).

Thanks for the link. I always read the comments at the end of articles. There's a MS developer in there that worked on RT software and said that that touchscreen mod has no effect at all and can in fact cause errors. Its said the touchscreen is governed by the firmware and that registry hack wouldn't do anything. Also possible battery life decrease. Interesting article for sure though.

 

[WillysJeepMan]

@Kristal let me know if you apply these tweaks and its a noticeable improvement

@willie any drawbacks to those tweaks?

No drawbacks that I've seen. I've been testing things out pretty heavily over the past few days... noticeable improvements but no downsides.

Some reading about prefetch/superfetch:
Disable Superfetch & Prefetch for SSD in Windows 8 | 7
Why does Windows 8 not automatically disable Superfetch on SSD?
Windows 7/8 SSD Optimization (discussion, especially starting at Enigma's post)

The long and short of it is... Win7 and Win8 automatically detects an SSD in use and all of those prefetch/superfetch/defrag systems should be automatically optimized (i.e. SSD ignored for certain functions). So you can disable those things, but with Win8 being as "smart" as it's supposed to be, you won't see any additional performance gain.

SSDs have improved markedly since they first came to market; I remember those days, sort of. Read/write life should surpass the normal lifespan of SSD-based devices (yes, Surface) even by my standards. The touchscreen lag tweak looks a lot more useful, though I never bothered to tweak my RT.


Edit to add: I spotted this about the touchscreen tweak. http://www.geek.com/microsoft/how-t...rosoft-surface-rt-with-a-simple-hack-1536045/ The conclusion is interesting. Like I said, though, I never bothered to tweak my RT, as it's really fast enough for me (from a practical standpoint, though, being able to resell v1 at a higher rate now than a year from now is one reason why I'm upgrading).

I read those too. All I know is that those tweaks had an effect. Maybe there are bugs in how things are "supposed" to function and these tweaks correct it.