Search / 19 posts tagged vista performance tweaks

As a tech writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad advice littered across almost every web site dedicated to system tweaking. Besides the tweaks that simply don't work, some of them will actually cause your computer to run even slower—or worse.

Folks, today I’m passing along a quick tip that I picked up from Bill Detwiler over at TechRepublic. This is for folks who are running Vista and who have installed Service Pack 1. As I wrote about in my article Running with Vista Service Pack 1, If you are running a Vista machine, you really want to install the package of Updates and bug fixes called “SP1″.

In just a few clicks, you can improve the appearance of items on your screen, make things easier for your eyes, and get peppier performance out of your PC. Making adjustments to settings, and turning various things on or off, is known as “tweaking”, and sometimes “optimizing”.

The best way to improve system performance is to make better use of your RAM. Understanding the Windows Task Manager's Performance graphs and indicators will help you determine what you should do. The first rule of thumb is that you can never have enough RAM. More is better.

Windows Vista is a great looking operating system with some awesome features, but it can be slow, unless you’ve got a hugely powerful PC to run it. For most computers however, a few quick Vista tweaks can make a massive difference in the speed of Vista for everyday use.

There are many areas in Windows Vista and XP that you can delete temporary files and decrease disk usage. Sure you can download free tools that clean up temp and orphan files, but do they really catch everything and guide you in decreasing unnecessary usage of disk space in windows? If you want do do things right, you do them yourself sometimes.

This tweak applies to Windows Vista or XP. If you are running many applications, especially large resource hogs that eat huge amount of memory, your system may become unstable or even crash. You can increase the total amount of memory in your system with a simple virtual memory adjustment of the paging file on your system.

Windows Vista by default installs services and configures several applications which may not suite your needs. If you are a home user rather than in a business environment there are many things you can change to give your computer that little extra oomph for applications and process you use.

Vista Logo Boot Generator is a free Windows Vista program that you can use to change the default boot screen in Windows to your own custom image. You can use an image of two sizes, either 800×600 or 1024×768, so you’ll have to scale any images you might want to use to that size first and they must be in .bmp format.

The indexing service in Windows Vista allows Windows to search for files faster. By default Windows Vista indexes all files. This service can cause a high load on the system. For the best performance you should disable the indexing service for all other locations other than the Start Menu.