Making Vista Perform

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It is always surprising to me how many people put up with poor performance and assume there is little or nothing they can do about it. In writing this post I don't, at least initially, intend to repeat the detail of many of the tweaks around the web. There are some excellent treatises on the subject. What I want to do instead is look at the strategies you can adopt, and then hopefully point to some of the resources for you to chase down the detail.

For any computer the slowest component is... your disk. Actually since the web is so much of life your Internet connection is also very slow. So optimising disk performance and Internet should be your top focus. What follows has this notion in mind throughout...

To begin with have you got enough memory? These days memory is cheap. So if you are buying a computer get one with as much memory as possible. For most people they should the CPU rating: traditionally the only real value in CPU rating is in selling computer magazines! Memory is so much more important. 4gig ram is a great target to aim for these days, and totally realistic for many people's purses. If your computer can take more ram then buy more, it really will pay dividends.

Then you simply must run Windows Update. This could easily update some drivers that could be buggy. Yes, Windows Update is not just about security or functionality - it can also be about performance.

Next you should consider if you can remove programs that are not needed. For instance some programs like Real Player, Java runtime, Quicktime, Jacrobat reader install things into your startup. These are of no benefit to you. So looking at your startup programs is a must. My preferred tool for this is the Sysinternals' AutoRuns, since it gets into places that other startup managers tend to avoid.

Along the same subject removing some services is also generally a good thing, but care is needed. Fortunately there are some excellent resoources that can help you pinpoint what can be removed.

Strangely the disk system is not set up optimally, and there are tweaks using device manager to enable DMA and features like writeback caching.

Ensuring you have a fixed swapfile of a suitable size is also recommended. And at this point one can move onto defragmenting the disk. The ultimate defrag tool, imo, is PerfectDisk - especially for Vista.

Ensuring you have a decent AntiVirus service running is a prerequisite. Not all are the same though. Some will slow down your computer. I currently use Avast and feel it behaves well.

Many people like the frills such as Vista's Aero, Sidebar and screen effects. If however you switch these off your computer will run noticably faster. The same is also true of the System Restore and Indexed Searches function.

By the time you have done the above your computer should run pretty well. However life does not stop there.

For me, and I guess you, the browser is where you spend most of your computer time? So using a decent browser and making sure it runs fast is very important. At the top of my list are Opera, which is extremely fast without any changes, and Firefox, which with a few tweaks (eg pipelining) can absolutely fly.

Now if your are talking browsing the web, then obviously optimising your Internet connection is paramount. This could mean tweaking your MTU., but checking what needs changing can be done at DslReports.

I think it is needless to say that changing any of the above could actually cause you problems, unless you do your research and test each change. For instance switching off the System Restore feature is not for the faint hearted, since you are actually removing a safety net in case of critical failure.

If you follow the above guidelines, then you will keep your computer running today like it did when you first bought it, if not a lot better. Not a bad aim really.