Simple tweaks to improve Vista performance
Improving the performance of Vista, particularly on older equipment or portable computers, is always being discussed. There are many guides that cover how to do this, usually by turning Vista services off or disabling functions of the OS. Infoworld recently published an excellent short guide detailing Twelve unnecessary Vista features to disable that is a great place to start and easy to do even for newbies. Some of the features they recommend disabling are common sense items like the Sidebar and Aero interface both of which have a pretty good hit on system resources and thus slow many systems down. A couple of the features they recommend disabling are Internet printing and remote access, both of which most people do not use. I disabled both of these on one of my notebooks and it is performing a little better. Hit up the article and see if you can tweak your Vista system to give better performance. Microsoft acknowledges that Vista often needs to be optimized on some systems and have published their own tuning guide which may help too.
Slightly ironic timing seeing as the Tablet PC features are listed in there..
I read that article, and I thought that most of the suggestions were poorly thought out, and provided no benchmarks as to whether they actually improved things. There is so much myth in improving Windows performance.
I wouldn’t recommend turning off Windows Error Reporting. Apart from the fact that, as the article sarcastically states, it helps Microsoft resolve issues with Windows and it also helps users troubleshoot their own issues. I’ve found it to be quite helpful and happily leave it running. As T Man said, who knows whether disabling it would even make any difference without some evidence.
The other thing to note is that removing Tablet PC components removes the Snipping Tool which can be quite useful regardless of whether you’re using a tablet or not. Mind you, I prefer SnagIt which is far more powerful.
Nice timing James. Just picked up a screamer of a Gateway 17″ for $1249 with Vista 64 on board. Will be doing some major tweaks and testing this week and next week to see how it runs.
While I find these tips to be helpful, I also find it sad in an irony sort of way.
James,
This article has been making its way around the web, and it is mostly garbage. Sure, turning off the sidebar and Aero can net some perfomance gain. But many of the items listed don’t consume resources other than HD space unless required (e.g. Tablet PC components). And while the author does say turning off indexing is a trade-off, he acts as if the only use for the indexing service is searching for files by name. If you’ve used the start menu recently, you would know this is not true. Also, Outlook for example relies on the search service.
Certainly there are ways to tweak Vista, but don’t belive that this article will cure your performance woes.
Yikes!! Read the comments associated with the original article…not well received!