Empower Information Systems

Vista has been out a few months now and it was bound to happen, someone asked me today, how can I speed up Vista? Well sooner or later everyone will be asking themselves this question so i decided to take a look at some of the Vista features and their impact on performance.

Well I came up with something that may help for most users. It is called “Remote Differential Compression”. What is RDC you may ask? Below is a quote and explanation from Microsoft.

RDC is a “diff-over-the wire” client-server protocol that can be used to efficiently update files over a limited-bandwidth network. RDC detects insertions, removals, and re-arrangements of data in files, enabling DFS Replication to replicate only the changed file blocks when files are updated.

In English that means Remote Differential Compression measures the changes in files over a network to transfer them with minimal bandwidth rather than transferring an entire file that has previously been moved. By constantly checking for file changes, this service can hinder system performance.

In a typical RDC scenario, a server and a client have different versions of a file. (The terms client and server refer only to the computers’ roles in this scenario, not their operating systems.) The client’s copy of the file is called the seed file. The server’s copy is called the source file. The objective of the RDC application is to download the file updates to the client, which uses them to construct a target file that combines the updates from the source file with the unchanged contents from the seed file.

So does this constant searching for file updates slow your system down? It can and sometimes will. If you are looking to try to do some tuning and would like to boost your system, you should try turning off RDC. Unless your system is replicating DFS from a network, your should be good to go.

So, Here is how it’s done! (If you would like to see a screencast of the information below, click here)

Turn off Remote Differential Compression

To disable this service:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Switch to Classic View
3. Select Program Features
   
4. Choose Turn Windows features on and off
   
5. Scroll down and uncheck Remote Differential Compression