MASTER TUTORIAL: Make Your Windows VISTA Super Fast


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cheers Vishal for some of the tips. Although i agree that these won't make any considerable speed impact on my vista system, i have to give you credit for your large contributions, whether it be vista visual styles, guides or advice :D

keep up the good work and dont let people easily put you off what you enjoy to do :D

^^ Thanks. :)

cheers Vishal for some of the tips. Although i agree that these won't make any considerable speed impact on my vista system, i have to give you credit for your large contributions, whether it be vista visual styles, guides or advice :D

keep up the good work and dont let people easily put you off what you enjoy to do :D

Thats really so nice of you. I appreciate it. I'm sharing my work and I'll keep sharing in future. I respect all kind of comments whether its good or bad. ;)

I am not going to down on Vishal for making the attempt - insofar as I can tell, on someone's system these tweaks can actually make things a lot easier / faster to work with. Having run Vista for over a year (and retail since just at a year) I can see how some of the proposed 'tweaks' would be beneficial to someone who needed a very fast way to access them - such as an always on Command Prompt context menu.

That being said, though, let me also say that I am one of those people using Vista Ultimate on an 'older' machine - specifically:

MSI 865PE Neo-2 Platinum mobo with a P4 3.2E (Prescott) CPU

3 GB (3 x 1GB) Corsair XMS 3200 DDR RAM

triple 7200 RPM IDE HDs - 120 GB Seagate Barracuda, and 80/40 GB WDs

ATI Radeon x1650 Pro AGP GA with dual 19" CRTs running at 1600 X 1200 resolution (ViewSonic GS790 and Philips 109B)

Vista runs a bit slower in terms of rendering pages and such on my 20+ Mbit Cable connection, compared to a Dell Core2Duo E6400 Machine with 2 GB DDR2 and a 200 GB SATA drive running Vista Home Premium, but I have it going full blown Aero - Maximum Glass (even on maximized windows) and all of the options that Vishal 'turns off' running - and I have no problems with it. It plays NFS:MW:Black and NFS:Carbon, The Witcher, and even renders Far Cry beautifully, as the GA should.

I also will *never* ever disable UAC - it's like trying to run as root all the time in *nix - just plain dumb. All of my apps run fine, and I have found fixes (early on, it was the inclusion on Manifest files for executables that would not run correctly) that have kept things going as I need them to throughout my experiences with Vista.

Perhaps a greater explanation of what each step does and *why* it provides an objective (or subjective) speedup would be beneficial to the readers here.

  • 2 weeks later...

Hey, this thread made me register on this site so i could post a reply.

Thanks to the original poster. This is a great guide especially where you explain all the registry hacks, I was about to dismiss them as a bunch of nonsense little piddly tweaks that don't even help performance until i read their descriptions and realized that these are some of the most helpful tweaks even just in terms of usability that I would like to use myself. Thanks for making it easy to pick and choose which ones are suited for me.

  • 2 weeks later...

The unnecessary UI effects are a nice, cheap boost in performance. No harm done from making a mistake, just reapply them as needed. The only thing he mentioned that I would beware of is the services section. A lot of people make the mistake of disabling a few, getting hooked and guessing which others would be safe to turn off because they seem pointless. If you don't know what it is or what it does, leave it alone! I would also stay away from any tweaks involving virtual memory. There are a ton of conflicting arguements about the optimal settings because each system is different. Other than that, it's a great start for those looking for quick fixes.

I don't know if I'm breaking Neowin ettiquette or anything, but if you truly want a good Vista Tweaking guide, you can go here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

It contains a long list of excellent tweaks that will drop seconds off your boot and shutdown, as well as give you a peppier system.

Ciao

good work composing this guide

but on my personal opinion these registry settings are set the way they are for a reason, I mean honestly Microsoft would of made the most optimizations needed in Vista. In XP it was a different story.. but with SP3 on the horizon even those tweaks will be useless.

Just my 2 cents

  • 1 month later...
maybe that's because here on neowin members generally tend to be far more knowledgeable than on other forums...

the tweaks you have detailed are misleading as they claim to improve vista performance, however, focus mainly on changing minor user preferences. for example, how would adding a shortcut to a command window in the context menu improve performance?

As stated previously, vista does not respond well in terms of performance to such 'tweaks'.

The members here at Neowin generally tend to "Think" that they are more knowledgeable than on other forums. What I have found to be the case is that the majority of them are a bunch of ungrateful, know it all types that love to blow their own horn.

When someone takes the time and effort to put together a a guide, they should not be treated in such a manner. I find it disgusting. IMHO.

Thank you Vishal for putting this guide together.

I don't know if I'm breaking Neowin ettiquette or anything, but if you truly want a good Vista Tweaking guide, you can go here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

It contains a long list of excellent tweaks that will drop seconds off your boot and shutdown, as well as give you a peppier system.

Ciao

Oh God, there are far too many spelling errors and use of shorthand for me to really think that guy knows what he's talking about.

"omg get dis defrag tool rite! also get ccleaner kthx <3"

I did actually use some of the tweaks.. such as the shutdown wait timer and the external monitor check task.

Thanks for the tips. I was always too paranoid to dig around and disable things, but the Visual Effects and Services tweaks made my system feel a little more responsive. Thanks again.

  • 2 months later...
The members here at Neowin generally tend to "Think" that they are more knowledgeable than on other forums. What I have found to be the case is that the majority of them are a bunch of ungrateful, know it all types that love to blow their own horn.

That's the truest thing i've read on this forum in the longest time :thumbsup:

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