How to speed up Windows Vista with simple tweaks

Windows Vista is a large operating system, there’s no denying it.  With so many services and processes running in the background, even a system with more than sufficient memory can become bogged down quickly.  Vista consumes 32MBs of graphics memory alone, while the many included services take up nearly 512MBs on average, leaving little room for performance- especially on slower machines with little memory.

Luckily, there’s plenty of simple tweaks you can make to alter your system configuration to run much smoother and quicker.  Above all else, a quick fix to significantly speed up processing is to use a USB drive and Vista’s built-in “ReadyBoost” feature.  Since hard drives are slower by nature, using a USB drive to act as a cache will give you much quicker response times overall.  ReadyBoost caches the disk so it can retrieve data quickly when needed, while also encrypting the cached data for privacy.  It’s best to use a USB drive with at least 1GB of storage, and fast read/write speeds.  Here’s how to get it working properly, Vista does most of the work for you;

1. Plug your USB drive into an open slot
2. Windows will ask you whether you want to use it as an external drive or as a ReadyBoost drive.
3. Choose the ReadyBoost tab.
4. Click the radio button next to “Use this device
5. Set the amount of space to equal your system’s memory (i.e 1GB).
6. Click the OK button.

If you’d like to go straight to simple system tweaks, there’s a number of options.  Most importantly, you can disable Vista’s indexing service to free up some much-needed RAM.  Go to Start, and type “Indexing Options,” click modify, then “Show All Locations.”  Start unchecking everything you don’t want indexed, if not everything.  This should give you a noticeable speed boost. 

The second most important tweak is to alter your startup processes using the MSCONFIG tool.  First, press Windows + R, type “msconfig,” and click OK.  The system configuration screen will appear.  Click the “Startup” tab, and start unchecking everything you think you’ll not use.  By default, Vista runs way to many services and processes that can all be disabled using this window.  When you’ve unchecked as many as possible, move over to the “Services” tab, check the box at the bottom labeled “hide all Microsoft Services,” and start unchecking any unnecessary services you think are not needed.  Click OK to save the changes once you’re finished.

Finally, as with any OS, it’s important to defragment as often as you can.  Vista’s defragment tool is nothing special, so it might be worth it to download a third-party application that would do the job a little better.  Hopefully, if all these steps are taken, you’ll see a noticeable difference in the overall performance of your system. 

From : http://vista.blorge.com/