10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows Vista
4. Tweak Indexing Service
I personally don’t mind the new search too much. It still hogs a lot of resources though. To turn it off completely:
- Go to my computer, right click on C: drive, go to the General tab, and uncheck Index this drive for faster searching, select Include subfolders and files.
- If you want, you can just remove any extra areas of search, so you can keep your fast searching for some areas.
I personally find the indexing of control panel options and start menu items to be a blessing, so I would leave those alone. Just find items in the tree that you really don’t wish to be indexed (like your documents).
5. While you are at it, fix the rest of your search options
It is often that I do searches for text in files, like a method use in a PHP file, or maybe something in a java file. Regardless of the situation, Windows Vista has a very limited number of file extensions flagged for full text searching, which causes you to get ‘no results’ when you know there are some.
- Open Control panel and type in ‘indexing’ into the search box (or you can do this from your start menu, but many people turn it off).
- Select ‘Indexing Options’
- Select Advanced Button
- Select ‘File Types’ Tab
- In this list you will see a list of extensions. When you click on most of them, the bottom radio button will change from ‘index properties only’ or ‘index properties and file contents’
- Honestly, index properties only is pretty useless for what most people will use search for (i.e. really only search by date).
- Uncheck a box to have it removed from search. This can be done for a variety of extensions that honestly, you don’t want in search anyway. It will actually help your results.
- Change the radio button to ‘index properties and file contents’ to have these file types included in your searches (should be set for word docs, etc and any other text-based files you search for)
6. Get rid of the sidebar
Pretty self explanatory. It’s a heavy and ugly. If you use it, great, if you don’t reclaim some desktop space. Install googles version. Or yahoos.
7. Defender has a use?
Yes, windows defender actually has a purpose!
- Open it up
- Click on tools
- Click on Software Explorer
- This will let you select groups of items, the default is Startup Programs. Now you can see that oh, Open Office quickstart is there, and I can just disable it there.
Items in this list are very likely to be programs that are running 100% of the time your computer is on, so if you can live without them, kill em.
Almost to the end of part 1. The final page is filled with some more advanced things you can do, but they can take a bit of time…
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Comment by Patrick on 26 July 2008:
Ok, I am back and I must tell everyone that tips no.1 is really effective and you know what I did, I uncheck all the options and the whole vista layout is gone and I got the old version of windows theme, but the point is my system is going faster, way faster than I expected so I really appreciate you for taking the time to go through these and teach us how to do it..
Comment by Patrick on 26 July 2008:
I tried out step no 3 but it did not function and I do not know why..anyway will try to do it again but the other steps are pretty impressive..
Comment by nikev on 9 July 2008:
I can’t agree with Richard Noorajen’s comment #32 …
my system:
Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo overclocked @ 3.8GHz
2 GB Ballistix PC-2 8500’s DDR2 Memory overclocked @ 1200MHz
Nvidia Geforce 8600 GT card
320GB Spinpoint-T SATA II HD
VISTA Ultimate + SP1
VISTA performance rating = 5.6
… despite tweaking VISTA’s services I still have a total of 32 services running in the background eating up memory. When idle, with no applications running, VISTA is consuming 500 - 550MB of memory. Thats over 25% of my memory gone with VISTA doing nothing, just sitting there looking pretty!
I’m dual booting VISTA along side XP PRO, now lets compare the two, XP PRO services I have tweaked down to just 14 services running in the background, it idles using only 96MB of memory, and everything runs faster, applications open and run faster, gaming is faster, just about anything I want to do is faster on my XP system.
If you want pretty looks use VISTA, if you want a fast system use XP !
Pingback by 10 Simple Ways to Speed up Windows Vista - Ken’sTechnology Blog on 2 July 2008:
[...] 10 Simple Ways To Speed Up Windows Vista Tags: microsoft, tweak, vista, windows Tips, windows-vista [...]
Comment by conversem on 13 June 2008:
Thanks for the tips. I have turned the UAC off a long time ago. But I still hear from people that they really hate vista because of that feature and they don’t know how to turn it of or they think that it will harm their pc when they turn it off. So its a good think that you post the “how to” here.
Another tip is:
.
-Buy a new graphic card, RAM, processor or all
That’s really the best cure.
Oyes another real tip here:
Go to the startmenu–> Type in: msconfig –>and it enter –>Then click on the tab “services –> remove everything which is not necessary but look out you can’t remove everything! –> then go to the next tab “start up” and also remove unwanted processes.
This should make your start up a lot faster!
Pingback by Windows 7 Will Break Backwards Compatibility | Windows 7 News on 23 May 2008:
[...] reason why Vista runs so slowly is: The operating system stores multiple copies of core system libraries, as each revision of a [...]
Comment by Cesar on 9 May 2008:
Nice tips thanks. I am only not sure if ReadyBoost will be really work.
Comment by John Walters on 4 May 2008:
Recently bought myself a new laptop with Vista Home on it. I’m new to Vista so this was a really interesting read. Cheers
John
Comment by Richard Noorajen on 30 March 2008:
Buy new PC with Core2duo/Quard/Extreme CPU, 2-4GB ram and congratulations speed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by Raman on 22 March 2008:
visit this too!
http://pluking.blogspot.com