features you disabled in Vista?

[The Dark Knight]

UAC (on silent mode)

ReadyBoost

Sidebar

System Restore

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

Yes. System restore is useless - until the first time you need it - and then it's invaluable. Unless you have a third party backup or imaging utility (such as True Image or Ghost) you should leave System Restore enabled. And even if you do have one of those utilities, there's no advantage to disabling System Restore except for disk space. And of course there's a huge pinned thread on UAC and why it makes no sense to disable it - it should just be set to silent mode if the pop-up warnings bother you. And then there's Superfetch - why exactly would someone disable that?

Oh well, to each his own ;)

System Restore has saved me a bunch of times. I would never disable it. It is better than SR was in Xp.

[Nayos]

UAC since it wouldn't let me access my other harddrive

[Brian M. Veteran]

User Account Control

System Protection (drives are imaged, data stored seperately)

Superfetch

Windows Search

Sidebar

Security Center

Windows Modules Installer (I enable it whenever I need it, it stops TrustedInstaller barraging my CPU (and battery life)).

As for superfetch, battery life for me is more important than applications starting 2 seconds faster, and the constant hard drive thrashing that superfetch causes has a severe negative impact on battery life.

[ViperAFK]

Because it slows down a lot of games and similar applications. It also sits there and crunches at your harddrives for no apparent reasons. The day I turned off, my performance increased for everything *but* the initial loading of programs. But a **** lot of good that does; I'd rather wait an extra second or two for the application to load and then have it run smoothly and effortlessly for the entirity of the session.

Your experiences may vary. Disabling Superfetch definitely speeds things up on my end for the applications I use the most.

Superfetch does NOT slow down games. I have tried superfetch on and off and games and intensive apps that need tons of memory perform the same and apps launch faster. When an application needs memory the cache is instantly purged which is no slower than allocating free memory.

Superfetch also does NOT cause hard drive thrashing, if you have constant drive thrashing it is something else, not superfetch. For me and I have 4 gb of ram superfetch only takes a minute of two to load everything into ram which is hardly "constant thrashing"

I have only disabled the sidebar and put UAC into silent mode on my desktop and laptop. Completely turning off UAC is pointless when you can use silent mode.

Edited August 29, 2008 by ViperAFK

[-Vivicidal-]

Sidebar - but only because I found it annoying.

[bbfc_uk]

None, don't see any need in disabling anything. I have a fast enought system that can cope with running 'Sidebar'!

Whats the point in buying Vista and disabling the features that make it!?!?!

[ambiance]

I forgot to mention Windows Defender.

[Ayepecks]

Sidebar, UAC.

[toadeater]

Why use Vista without all those wonderful "features" enabled? DX10?

[Srugie Veteran]

I forgot to mention Windows Defender.

+1

[CPressland]

I forgot to mention Windows Defender.

+2

[x-scratch]

40% of vistas features i removed or disabled

[xpgeek]

I turn off Windows Defender and disable its service, Avast already does active scanning for spyware too, don't need two 2 programs doing the same thing.

Windows Search, cause I don't really do much file system searching at all, and when I do I'm fine with the extra ten seconds or so to do it.

Sidebar, cause its just useless to me and never found any gadgets that I reallyyy needed.

System restore, cause its just a waste of drive space and I keep very good backups on my own.

Readyboost service disabled, cause I just neverr use it.

Windows Firewall, I use Comodo.

Security Center, cause its just useless to me. I know the status of my security.

Uh, thats bout it. I've grown to prefer UAC on. I am curious bout SuperFetch now tho, never even tried turning it off. People really seeing performance gains with it off?

[ViperAFK]

I turn off Windows Defender and disable its service, Avast already does active scanning for spyware too, don't need two 2 programs doing the same thing.

Windows Search, cause I don't really do much file system searching at all, and when I do I'm fine with the extra ten seconds or so to do it.

Sidebar, cause its just useless to me and never found any gadgets that I reallyyy needed.

System restore, cause its just a waste of drive space and I keep very good backups on my own.

Readyboost service disabled, cause I just neverr use it.

Windows Firewall, I use Comodo.

Security Center, cause its just useless to me. I know the status of my security.

Uh, thats bout it. I've grown to prefer UAC on. I am curious bout SuperFetch now tho, never even tried turning it off. People really seeing performance gains with it off?

if you have 2 gb of ram or more it will only make your system slower if you disbale it.

[zape]

None.

Disabling features is stupid. Unless you are on a laptop and want to save battery life.

[CPressland]

Well, I was just playing around with a Virtual Machine of Windows Vista Home Premium on my MacBook starting with 512MB of RAM and slowly moving up the ranks going up to 1.8GB of RAM (I only have 2GB of RAM and Leopard needs at least 200MB of RAM to function properly).

I can safely say that Vista was a LOT faster with SuperFetch OFF on anything below 1GB of RAM, however anything above 1GB SuperFetch was really helping.

For example

Firefox Web Browser 3.1 - 1.5GB of RAM

With Superfetch = 0.8 second load time

Without Superfetch = 3.7 second load time

Microsoft Word 2007 - 1.5GB of RAM

With Superfetch = 2 second load time

Without Superfetch = 12 seconds load time

Obviously I cannot check games as the virtual machine can only render DX7 graphics and i've got nothing that old :D but by the looks of things superfetch DOES dump everything when going into a full screen application. I saw my RAM useage jump from 82% to 12% in a matter of seconds, not paged to disk, dumped!

Superfetch does work in most normal situations, dont disable it.

EDIT: Forgot to mention boot times,

With SuperFetch an Extra 20 seconds, no big deal.

[jhunt31]

I disabled UAC because I think it is really annoying. I'm the only user of my PC so it's my fault if something goes wrong and I don't need UAC holding my hand and constantly popping up. :p

Also have disabled the sidebar because I don't use it.

[DigitalE]

Just the sidebar... I never used it, so I just got rid of it completely.

Other than that, I have no reason to disable anything else.

[anonymous_user]

Whats the point in buying Vista and disabling the features that make it!?!?!

Maybe because not everyone uses all the features of Vista?

As for the original question, I get rid lots of stuff: sidebar, search indexing, system restore, superfetch, etc...

vLite FTW! :punk:

[Shannon]

UAC

System Restore

Sidebar

Windows Defender

[Raa]

Depends on the PC, but I have various features disabled across them. Or XP installed. (best option)

Havent disabled superfetch though, I live with the HDD thrashing (Yes it does cause it - although in my case it doesnt happen often)

[AJR1]

User Account Control

Windows Sidebar

What the hell is superfetch?

[ViperAFK]

User Account Control

Windows Sidebar

What the hell is superfetch?

It uses free memory as a cache to open applications faster.

[zape]

User Account Control

Windows Sidebar

What the hell is superfetch?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperFetch#SuperFetch