Top 10 Tips to Speed Up Windows Vista

The bug-prone Windows Vista is suffering ever since its launch. Despite the loads of cool features that the operating system inherits, it has always been rubbed off for its sluggishness. For the performance hungry geeks, its the speed that matters and not the number of options that it offers. Well, the gearheads would never compromise on the system response times. Any common man will only welcome an OS with shorter PC bootup, shutdown times and running games faster. Windows Vista has a lot of safety and security options that interferes with the resources for the running applications. The Outlook 2007, indexing service and Windows Defender are quite responsible for the slow down. Why worry when there are pretty cool tweaks to gear up your Vista. Here’s my list of top 10 ways to speed up your Windows Vista.

1. Turn off the visual effects

The visual effects are mostly unnecessary and drain the memory, affecting the system performance. To stop the visual effects

1. Right-click on the My Computer icon

2. Select Properties

3. Click on Advanced system settings link in the left panel.

4.  Hit the Settings button in Performance section

5. In the Visual Effect section disable all the other options except the following

- desktop composition (If you want to use Windows Aero theme)
- transparent glass (If you want to use transparency in Windows)
- Show preview and filters in folder (If you use Details Pane in Explorer)
- Show thumbnails instead of icons (If you want to show thumbnails in Explorer)
- Show window contents while dragging (If you want windows to show content while moving them)
- Smooth edges of screen fonts (If you want to show smooth fonts)
- Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop (If you want to show shadows under desktop icon labels)
- Use visual styles on windows and buttons (If you want to use Windows Aero or Basic theme.)

2. Get rid of the sideline sidebar

Now most of you don’t need the little gadgets that hang up on the Vista sidebar. To get rid of it do this

1. Right click on the Windows sidebar icon in the taskbar tray and select Exit.

2. Open the Control Panel and go to the Appearance and Personalization category and select the Windows Sidebar Properties

3. Uncheck the Start sidebar when Windows starts and click OK

3. Stop the UAC

It’s important to prevent the OS from slowing down. Vista’s User Account Control often interferes with the speed, like often you get the Vista pop-up that asks you to Allow or Deny several actions. These constant UAC demands are part of the safety can slow down the system.  The easiest solution is to turn off the UAC an to do that

1. Go to the Control Panel and click User Accounts and Family Safety, select the User Accounts

2. Click Turn User Account Control on or off and when prompted click Continue

3. Uncheck the box and click Ok

4. Check if any hardware is responsible for slow down

Do the following to check which hardware is interfering with your system response.

1. Right-click My Computer and choose Properties

2. Click Windows Experience Index

Now, look for the lowest score. It is the impasse in your smooth Windows Vista experience. Suppose its the graphics card, replace it.

5.  Using the Ready Boost option

This is a new feature with Vista that makes use an external USB flash drive as cache to store the frequently accessed data. This feature helps to boost the performance up to 10 times. To use it

1. Insert insert the USB 2.0 flash drive into the USB port

2. When the Window pops up, click on the ReadyBoost tab

3. Choose Use this device

6. Turn of the hibernation

If you disable the hibernation feature in Vista you can recover at least a gigabite of the hard disk space. To do this

Open the Run and type in the following powercfg - H off

7. Turning off the Differential Compression

The Remote Differential Compression basically takes into account the changes in the files on the network to transfer them with minimal bandwidth rather than transferring the entire file which has been moved previously.  This Compression feature constantly checks for the changes in files

To disable this service

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

8. Disable Superfetch

This is an added feature with Vista that takes up free memory constantly to store frequency accessed data.Now, if you are gaming or running a lengthy video you can disable it. To do this

1. open the Run and type services.msc

2 Choose Stop/Disable SuperFetch

3. Reboot the computer.

9. Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation

Windows Vista has the defragment feature on by default. This not necessary and can cause system slow down. It’s enough to run a defrag manually once in a while. To disable the defrag

1. Click the My Computer
2. Right Click the C: Drive
3. Select the Tools Tab
4. Uncheck Run on a schedule

10. Limit the number of programs that load at startup

The unused programs often slows down the boot up, consuming the system resources. In order to avoid this you can remove the unused programs from the statup.
To do that

1. Open the Run box and type in msconfig

2. Click the startup tab

3. Uncheck the box next to any software that you don’t want to run at startup like disable VGA driver utility, Sound Card utility, etc.