GUIDE ON HOW TO ACHIEVE DECENT PERFORMANCE ON WINDOWS 10 POTATO BARBONE

Today i was given a low-epc potatto net top with the words:

This machine should run PostgreSQL, 
run web applications in Firefox web browser, 
we don't consider any upgrades at all, 
do your thing

Quite harsh, but who cares?
Actually installing second RAM stick with another 4Gb or inserting really fast USB stick and tune it for using
[ReadyBoost] would be quite helpful, to say the least. But no upgrades > means no upgrades.

To fully understand real performance of this typewriter.
Ultra-low speed spinning hard drive [it looks like that it’s even slower than 4000rpm],
4Gb of RAM and all of these in conjunction with Windows 10.
Actually it has even lesser amount of RAM because of embedded GPU Intel HD630,
which borrows it’s RAM obviously from the system memory poll.

After you click Start button to execute start menu it opens in about 5 or 6 seconds.
So the machine is universally bad in all terms.

Here is a list of things i have done to make this piece of cr#p do it’s job in a more proper way:

Purged all cache and possible system leftovers with the help of wonderful [DISM++]
Disabled unneeded services to save valuable RAM
Set fixed swap file to 8Gb [dynamic swap is wasting too much CPU cycles]
Installed latest Intel HD 630 drivers
Set forced hardware acceleration in Firefox settings
Done some under the hood Firefox tweaks to speed up overall responsivenes of the system

gfx.webrender.all: true (default: false)
layers.acceleration.disabled: true (default: false)
layers.acceleration.force-enabled: true (default: false)
browser.cache.disk.capacity: 512000 (default: 256000)
dom.ipc.processCount: 4 (default: 8)
browser.tabs.loadInBackground: false (default: true)

Created a PowerShell script that will launch browser with high priority
[for some reason batch file won’t assign priority to the started process, so i have to do PowerShell stuff]

$AppPath = "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

$ProcessName = [System.IO.Path]::GetFileName($AppPath)

Start-Process -FilePath $AppPath

Start-Sleep -Seconds 4

Get-WmiObject Win32_process -filter "Name = '$ProcessName'" | ForEach-Object { $_.SetPriority(128) }

TAKE A NOTE:
despite the fact that i don’t really like Chrome at all, i have to admit that
it is surely delivers [better GPU and JavaScript performance]

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