Fasten Up Your Vista Performance Now!!!

It has been a year since Vista had been released. Now more and more people shifting to Vista. With lots of graphical features available, such as aero transparency, flip 3D it will mostly leads to a performance hit.
If you think that your Vista’s performance lagging, here are some steps you can take to make it faster:

1. Add more RAM
   
   • Anyone who have uses Vista knows that Vista is one memory hog operating system. While 1GB of memory looks super on Win XP, it’s the opposite on Win Vista. Forget about the graphical features in Vista, with 1GB you can barely run three applications at one time. If you are still running Vista with 1GB I would suggest you to equip your system with at least 2GB of RAM.
2. Get a good video card.
   
   • Today video cards play an important role in influencing the computer performance unlike 5 years ago. With Vista Graphical feature such as Aero, Flip 3D, and many more a good or great video card is needed to run the Vista smoothly. If you are short of budget and did not care much about the entire graphical feature provided by Vista I suggest you turn off all the unneeded graphical features such as Vista Sidebar and Vista Aero (excluding Vista Home Basic Edition).
   • Vista Sidebar is one of the great features that Vista has. Although I said that, it comes of no use if we don’t make use of the applets. If you find that the sidebar is of no use to you, you should turn it off and disable it for good.
     
     • To turn it off - “right-click” the sidebar >> Close
     • To disable it – “right-click” the sidebar >> Properties >> Uncheck the "Start Sidebar when Windows starts" checkbox.
   • Vista Aero is the feature that provides the users with cool glassy and 3D effect. To those who are struggling with their Vista, it is wise for them to turn it off. The best way to turn off Vista Aero is told below:
     
     • To turn it off – “right-click” on Computer(My Computer) >> Properties >> Advanced System Settings(on Tasks) >> On Advanced tab click on Perfomance's Settings Button >> On Visual effects tab choose Custom and check any feature you would like to run.
     • If you choose to uncheck all the checkbox don’t be surprise if your window turns much like Windows Classic Themes.
3. Windows ReadyBoost
   
   • Ok this is the best way to increase your memory without buying any new RAM. With ReadyBoost, user will be able to increase their memory with their available flash disk. How cool is that. For those user who have limited memory expansion capabilities this will most probably their life savers, but there’s a catch, Vista will first checks on your flash disk to see if its see if its performance is fast enough to work with Windows ReadyBoost. If it doesnt, you won’t be able to improve your memory any time soon.
     
4. Stop Unneeded Starts Up Programs
• Ever wonder why it took so long just to load your operating system? Well it’s mostly related to too many starts up programs running when the operating system starts to load.
5. Use Windows System Tools.
• Often most of the users do not know of the Windows System Tools or scared of using it since there are afraid if the disk cleanup or defragmentation will delete their files or change any PC’s configuration.
• Well that’s easy enough to solve it isn’t it. All you users need to do is understands what the various system tools does. A good reference on defragmentation can be found at this link
• I’ll explain briefly on what disk cleanup does. Well like the name suggest, the disk cleanup will clean your disk good. But what exactly it cleans? Well for starters it lets you choose from various things such as Recycle Bin, Temporary files, Temporary Internet files, Hibernation Files cleaner, and many other things that will be opt to you.
• By doing both disk cleanup and defragmentation on a system which you have never defrag or cleanup, you’ll be surprise with how much your system will improves.
• I’ll be posting an article on the various system tools later in another article. So hope all of you be waiting for it.

Hope your Vista will give you better performance by following this short guide. Hope this will help.