As I’m sure we all know Visual Studio 2005 as great as it is isn’t the fastest application on the planet. The good news is there are a multitude of things we can change to speed it up. Now firstly let me just state that I’m not a fan of just linking to other people’s blogs or regurgitating their information however I have posted the links to Scott Guthrie’s blog below for reference.

The tip I wanted to add was a really quick and easy performance boost for Laptops. I guess you could also apply this to a desktop using the same logic. As you will see below having the OS on one hard drive and apps on another drive gives a huge performance increase in VS but what if your system is already setup? I had this issue with my laptop. The easy fix is to add a second drive to your laptop and move the OS paging file over to this drive. I also moved the SQL databases to this drive since that is easy enough. I noticed a remarkable improvement in visual studio performance and I didn’t have to go through the headache of moving source code, IIS settings or VSS settings. The paging file is the biggest one by far.

Scott’s Links for VS performance tuning:

Hard drive performance