I'm posting this in Win10 forum because I don't see a Windows general forum, but it applies to every Windows NT based edition. Now, many might not agree with what I will say and it probably is partially or fully wrong, but here goes: I want to disable all and any performance counters on my computer(s). I don't need measuring performance, I just want the computer to do what I tell it to do giving its best effort, nothing else. The mere act of measuring perfomance, especially in software, is taking performance away, which I think can be quite substantial when there are many of those counters. And I am not sure about the following, but I think V1 perf counters are hardware, V2 are software. In any case, I want to disable them all. I am aware that some things will stop working, and I am prepared to live with that if the consequences are known. Now, V1 performance counters were easy, in fact, I have been disabling them since Win2000 time and haven't noticed ill effects. Either through ExCtrlst or through registry, no problem. And it still works on all current Windows OSs. V2 perf counters are different, ever since 7 (or I guess Vista) they are located in the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib\_V2Providers) and many of the old tools from Microsoft don't work with them (unlodctr.exe and similar), and I can't easily enumerate them in usable form. That's why I think all V2 are software based. I tried deleting that entire registry key, but it was long time ago and I remember there were consequences (in task manager no CPU and Network activity could be seen), I can live with that, but that was on Win7 and on Win10 there are many more of them, so I am reluctant to do it again until I have time to make full backups and free time to tinker in general. So my questions are: 1. Are there any known tools to work with V2 performance counters? (Enumerate, disable, enable)? Searching every GUID under the registry key above gives some clues, but it's tedious when there are so many of them. 2. And if there are known consequences of disabling (deleting) some of them, i.e. this thing will not work, or that thing will not work, or similar. Or "this is safe to disable/delete"?
And: 3. If you disable them will they even stay disabled? I know raptorddd has been looking for ways to do this for a while; I gave up -- as the interest (and knowledge) of completely disabling all Windows telemetry including Windows event logging, and performance counters is incomplete at best, and has more caveats, loop-holes, exceptions, and issues, than any thousand pages of government legislation... And unlike horrific legislation, you have to look dozens or even hundreds of places on the interweb, and/or pages of forum threads, and at best you get revised but more typically conflicting information... I personally would love to be able to disable all Windows telemetry including: event logs, performance counters, and calling home. As well, as measurements show -- there's almost certainly other opaque background crap going on in the OS, storing things that do not need to be stored in some disk or RAM cache that has absolutely nothing to do with the housekeeping chores of running the OS, applications, or games.
i still use ExCtrlst to disable and any other way that was posted on the eventlog thread.. lets see if there is someone that knows and if theres a way.
Maybe I'm placeboing, but I re-did it on Win7 (which I'm currently on) and everything is smoother, there are no 'microstutters' or small waits in explorer and light web browsing. I don't remember why I reverted to default, I think something was not working, but now I can't find what. All I did was rename the "_V2providers" key. Also tried it on virtual machine (previous LTSC) and everything is working there too, but I didn't test much. There were no separate graphs for CPUs in Task Manager, but that's maybe due to the VM, although I doubt it.
last night i clean installed and did this at the beginning seems that it will create another key after a while or when something gets installed. so i had to rename that new key as well. _V2providers.BAK _V2providers.BAK2
I never thought of it until now, but I have deleted all Performance infs in folders in C:\Windows\inf a long time ago. I think it doesn't recreate them here because of that. Delete at your own risk. Never had a problem because of their deletion, even before I renamed the _V2providers registry key.
can delete back can also backup that folder right.? for me it created a new key.. i think i didnt do it correctly.. i did clean install yesterday and used trust installer and seems no new has been created. maybe i didnt use trsut installer last time.
are all file in this folder INF counters.? i mean you said you deleted them.? did you delete the folder or the files.? all files.? or you picked one by one. if so how do you tell wich ones. or just all area counters.?
They had another extensions, I think .ini. I don't touch inf's. Maybe there were subfolders, I don't remember any more...
right theres some .ini in there.. i guess ill just rename on registry. but wanted to make sure or test removing them. so not sure if i should do all files with .ini
No need to remove any of them. Now I am on another computer (LTSC 2021) and here I haven't removed anything. Just renamed _V2Providers to BACKUP_V2Providers and created another empty key _V2Providers just in case. Just for the record, the files I was talking about are in subfolders in C:\Windows\INF\, extensions .ini, .h and .hxx. On Win7 I deleted the subfolders, here I did not. _V2Providers weren't repopulated. I am sure they are disabled because I don't see 6 cpu graphs in task manager, only one, but it works. Another thing I do since XP times is to try to disable them from the registry (not enough, but I think it helps): Code: REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib] "ExtCounterTestLevel"=dword:00000004 "DebugTraceLevel"=dword:00000000 "Disable"=dword:00000001 "Disable Performance Counters"=dword:00000001 "EventLogLevel"=dword:00000002 EventLogLevel is according to my philosophy "If you must log, log only warnings and errors". GL
can performance counters for defenderapilogger defenderauditlogger be disabled.? tried but its like locked. or greyed out