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Speed up Vista |
| Windows Vista in its native state is a very slow operating system even when used with the best of hardware. The following tips will ensure that your Vista runs as FAST as it possibly can! 1. Never use Vista on any computer running less than at least a 2 Gig Dual core CPU with a minimum of 2Gig of RAM. 2. If you are setting up Vista on a new computer or laptop you will be given a selection to chose 32 bit or 64 bit Vista. Select 32 bit NEVER select 64 bit as this will use a huge amount of hardware resources and slow your computer down! 3. Install only the absolute minimum amount of software on your computer. The more software you have installed on your computer the slower it will run. 4. There are two components to Windows Vista's graphics that you can make changes to. First is the big one: The visual styles, which set the overall look of your system. There are four choices: Windows Aero, Windows Vista Basic, Windows Standard, Windows Classic.
If your computer supports Aero and it's turned on, you'll see a row of boxes showing the different colours you can choose for your windows.  If your computer doesn't support Aero (or it's not on), you'll see a box labelled "Appearance Settings" showing some sample windows and listing colour schemes.  Running Aero is actually a good thing in terms of system resources. In older versions of Windows, the more graphics displayed, the slower the computer. So you might think that Windows Classic, which has the fewest bells and whistles, will give you the fastest performance. But that's not exactly true for Vista. Both the Windows Aero and Windows Vista Basic (a.k.a. Aero Lite) use your computer's graphics card, not the computer's processor, to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the display. Using one of those -- as opposed to Standard or Classic -- actually lets your computer do less work. You can switch to Windows Vista Basic for most of Aero's graphics; that also saves resources. Here's how:
If you want to keep all of Aero's bells and whistles, you can still get a performance boost if you're willing to give up transparency. Here's how:
To review if your computer and your version of Vista support Aero, the following settings will speed up Vista: Fastest: Use Windows Vista Basic.  Tune ups without Aero
Suggestion: Keep "Smooth edges of screen fonts" and "Use visual styles on windows and buttons" or the result might look awful. Everything else is up to you.  Finally, while Vista's Sidebar can be a cool thing -- let's face it, that clock is kind of nice -- it's also a resource hog. It slows your computer. Disable it.
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