How to make Windows Vista run faster

So you are using Windows Vista and feel that its slower than WIndows XP? Then you have come to the right place.



Following tutorial will help you in tweaking your Windows Vista to the max and you’ll feel a significant improvement in your system performance. So without wasting any time lets start:

1. Following is a registry file containing a few registry modifications, which are completely safe and can increase the performance of Windows Vista. Just download the attached ZIP file, extract it and then run the file:

Tweak Windows Vista

Restore Default Settings (Use this file if you want to restore default Windows settings)

2. Right-click on My Computer icon on Desktop and select Properties (or press key + key), click on Advanced system settings link in left side pane (You can also open it by typing sysdm.cpl in RUN or start menu search box and press Enter). Now click on Settings button in Performance section:



Now disable all unnecessary options in Visual Effects tab, you can remain following options enabled according to your requirements:

- Enable desktop composition (If you want to use Windows Aero theme)

- Enable 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.)



3. Open Folder Options and click on View tab:



Now disable following options:

- Display file size information in folder tips.

- Display simple folder view in Navigation pane.

- Hide extensions for known file types.

- Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color.

- Show pop-up description for folder and desktop items.

Other options don’t affect the system performance. You can enable/disable them according to your requirements.

4. Type msconfig in RUN or Startmenu search box and press Enter. Now goto Startup tab and deselect the unnecessary entries, which you don’t want to start automatically with Windows, e.g. you can disable VGA driver utility, Sound Card utility, etc to speed up the startup time and to increase system performance.

You can also disable these items using Windows Defender. Open Windows Defender and click on Tools and then click on “Software Explorer“.

5. Open Sound in Control Panel (or type mmsys.cpl in RUN or Startmenu search box and press Enter), goto Sounds tab and select No Sounds in Sound Scheme section. Or you can remain some of your favorite sounds but set Exit Windows, Windows Logoff, Windows Logon and Start Navigation to (None).

6. At last I’ll advise to defrag the HDD regularly, install only necessary software, use the latest drivers and keep your Windows updated.

Original Post: MakeTechEasier

How to speed up your external USB drives in Windows Vista

If you’re like me, you’ve probably expanded the storage on your computer by adding an external hard drive or two. I’m not talking about one of those USB thumb drives. I’m referring to the USB connected 80GB+ drives that often require a separate power source.

In my system I store backups and archived data to the external drive, mostly items that I don’t plan to access frequently. That being said, there is no reason why it couldn’t be a little quicker when I am using it. Windows Vista has a little known tweak that will speed up your external USB hard drives and I’m going to show you how to do it.

The trick to improving the external drive’s performance is in something called Write Caching. The PC Guide defines write caching as:

Caching reads from the hard disk and caching writes to the hard disk are similar in some ways, but very different in others. They are the same in their overall objective: to decouple the fast PC from the slow mechanics of the hard disk. The key difference is that a write involves a change to the hard disk, while a read does not.

When write caching is enabled, when the system sends a write to the hard disk, the logic circuit records the write in its much faster cache, and then immediately sends back an acknowledgement to the operating system saying, in essence, “all done!” The rest of the system can then proceed on its merry way without having to sit around waiting for the actuator to position and the disk to spin, and so on. This is called write-back caching, because the data is stored in the cache and only “written back” to the platters later on.

Due to the fact that caching tells the operating system that it is done even though it isn’t, there is always the potential for data loss if power is cut. The screenshots below show the warning that explains the you must use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to disconnect the drive. Failing to do so could cause data loss. It is also recommended to have your computer connected to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to assist with unexpected power outages.

Now that the education piece is out of the way, here is how to speed up your external USB drives in Windows Vista.

Start by opening the Control Panel, then open Device Manager. Expand Disk Drives and locate your portable drive.



In my example, I’m using a Western Digital 300 GB external drive. Double-click the external drive that you want to adjust to access the properties window.



Once open, click on the Policies tab and select the Optimize for performance radio button. Click Ok to save your changes. You should see a prompt like the one below advising you to reboot.



The settings won’t actually take effect until you reboot your computer. Once the reboot is complete you’re done! Wasn’t that easy?

Top 10 Windows Vista tips and tricks to increase your gaming Performance

Although Windows Vista is a great operating system with tons of great features and application, when it comes to gaming, its performance is still lagging behind Windows XP. One of the reasons is that most of the current games are not designed for Windows Vista which utilizes the new DirectX 10 technology. Another reason is that Windows Vista has a lot of activities running in the background that interferes with the gaming resources.

Below I have compiled 10 useful Windows Vista tips and tricks to help you improve your gaming performance.
1) Upgrade your hardware

This includes the RAM, CPU and graphics card. For gaming in Vista, make sure that you own a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM and a DirectX 10 compliant graphics card.

2) Disable System Restore

Vista’s System Restore helps you to backup your files and provide a restoration in the event that the OS crash. Although a useful feature, it can slow down your system to a great extent. To disable it, click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System and remove the tick next to any drives that you have protected.

3) Turn off hibernation

If you don’t use the hibernation feature, you can disable it and recover around a gigabyte of hard disk space. To do this, open up “Run” and type “powercfg - H off”

4) Disable the Sidebar

While this is a great eye-candy, it takes up a lot of resources. To disable the sidebar, open Control Panel -> Windows Sidebar Properties. Uncheck the “Start Sidebar When Windows Start”.

5) Move swap file to another drive/partition

Swap file is a temporary file used to store data for future use. If you have another drive, you can speed up Vista a bit by moving the swap file to that drive. Or if you are using only one drive, you can set up a partition to store your swap file.

- Click on Start -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System

- Choose Advanced system settings from the top left hands side

- Make sure that the Advanced tab is selected

- In the Performance section click Settings

- Click on the Advanced tab

- In the Virtual Memory section click Change

- Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file sizes for all drives”

- Click on the partition you want to use as a swap partition, select Custom Size, and set the new sizes of your swap file. The recommended size is 2.5 times your RAM size, and my choice is to set the Initial Size and Maximum Size values equal, to get a fixed size swap file.

- Click on the primary partition, check “No paging file” and click Set. This is to prevent Vista from placing a swap file on your primary partition.

- Restart the computer

6) Add 3D sound

The DirectX 10 architecture changed the ways sound is processed in gaming. If you are playing Windows XP games that use hardware 3D audio effects, most likely you will not hear any sound at all. To overcome this, you can use Creative’s ALchemy tool. Download and install the ALchemy tool from Creative website. This tool will pipe any DirectSound calls in Windows XP games to OpenAL to give it a full 3D audio hardware support.

7) Turn off Vista’s Indexing Engine
The Vista’s Indexing Engine is a useful tool that allows you to search for files easily. However during gaming, it is running in the background and takes up resources that affect the gaming performance. To turn it off, go to Control Panel -> Indexing Option. Click Modify -> Show All Locations to remove any drives or folders that you don’t want to be indexed.

8) Change your Startup program

To prevent any unused programs from loading during the boot up process and take up your system resources, you can change your startup program by typing “msconfig” into the Run box. Click the startup tab and uncheck the box next to any software that you don’t want to run during startup.

9) Use Ready Boost

This is a new feature in Vista that uses an external USB flash drive as a cache to store frequently access data. It is said to be able to increase the performance up to 10 times. Insert in a USB 2.0 flash drive into your USB port. In the window that pops up, click on the ReadyBoost tab. Select “use this device”.

10) Disable SuperFetch

Another new feature of Vista that utilizes all your free memory to store frequency accessed data. While it is a good feature, it is actually causing more harm to your game performance. Your game needs a lot of free memory to load maps, process AI and so on, while the SuperFetch is constantly taking up free memory to store data. To disable the SuperFetch, open Run and type “services.msc”. Select “Stop/Disable SuperFetch”, and then reboot the computer.