Tweaking Windows Vista

[Andy Pritchard]

Having happily (performance/usability wise) used XP SP2 for many years. I
was looking forward to installing vista home premium and making use of the
new security features, performance enhancements and windows media center
functionality.

I quickly discovered after upgrading that vista is not the most efficient OS
ever created. Having spent my money I was determined to get the performance
to the same level if not better than XP SP2

The following is a list of tweaks that I did to make vista operate at the
same level as XP SP2 did (in no particular order)

<1> Apparently there is a bug in the feature 'Remote Differential
Compression' and this should be turned off via Control Panel / Programs and
Features / Turn Windows features on and off. From here un-tick 'Remote
Differential Compression'.

Also un-tick any other windows features that you will not use

<2> Turn off automatically running windows defender
<3> Turn off automatically running defrag
<4> Turn off windows search of you entire PC from Control Panel / Taskbar
and Start Menu / Start menu / Customize / Search files and select Don't
search for files
<5> Ensure you have at least 1.5gig of RAM
<6> Grab yourself a ReadyBoost USB drive (at least 2gig)
<7> Turn off hibernate (unless you use the sleep function of windows)
<8> Turn off system restore (warning! unless your are confident at fixing
your PC when windows goes wobbly leave this one on)

 

[Guest]

It might be a good idea, too, to disable unnecessary services in System
Control Panel-Administration-Services.

There are a lot of services at least a Home User will not need (Encryption,
IPSec, etc.)