The Way To Use Vista Without A Glitch On Slower PCs

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Two years back Microsoft launched Windows Vista with much fanfare and touted it as the most secured and advanced OS ever produced. However, the resource guzzling nature of Vista created a huge uproar all over the world and several buyers who got Vista pre-installed opted for a XP downgrade. But it is quite obvious that Microsoft will gradually phase out the support for XP and Windows 7 will take some time to be accepted by the computer users. Hence, the existing users of Vista need to be aware of the ways to survive with it on their existing computers.

With some amount of tweaking and setting adjustment one can reduce the resource consumption of Vista to an extent e.g here’s one good guide for speeding up Vista.  More tips for making Vista faster, particularly useful for people who have older computers at home and do not want to replace the existing PC anytime soon, are below.

Discarding the eye candy: It is well known that Vista is equipped with lots of visual effects that do precious little than revving up the interface. However, most of the home users do not need a glossy interface if it comes at the price of a reduced performance. Sidebar is a widget that consumes resource and it can be turned off if not required. One can also switch off visual effects like fading and shadows from control panel. Besides, it is possible to speed up the machine significantly by shunning the Aero theme altogether.

Opt for Readyboost: Windows Vista has a neat feature known as Readyboost that lets the users obtain enhanced performance by using a USB drive. This feature instructs Vista to treat an external data storage device as additional memory. While it is not the equivalent to physical memory upgrades the results are quite satisfying for the users of slower computers.

Disabling unnecessary Services: By default, Vista runs a set of services that are not required by the majority of home users. These services can be manually disabled to cut down on computer resources. To stop unnecessary services one can type services.msc in the run dialog box. Thereafter, a list of services running under the OS will be shown with descriptions. Services like Remote Registry, Offline Files etc can be safely disabled. However, essential services like Superfetch and Windows Driver Foundation should not be disabled. Hard Drive performance tweaks: People having SATA hard drives in their PCs can boost the performance of the hard disks under Windows Vista. There is a setting under device manager named ‘Enable Advanced Performance’ that significantly improves hard disk performance. The downside is that the user stands to lose data in the event of a power cut. Hence, people who have an UPS at home should use this feature.

Defrag: some people mistakenly think that Windows Vista does not need to be defragged like its predecessors. This is not correct. The users need to defrag their hard drives at least twice a month to keep the PC running fast. There are some third party disk fragmenting software that do a better job than the Windows integrated application.

Read Related Posts

1. Add Remote Desktop Access To Windows Vista Home Editions
2. 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows Vista
3. Get Vista Aero Effect on Windows XP
4. Add Vista Thumbnails To XP Toolbar

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