My first impression of Windows Vista was that it was a very shiny operating system with lots of useless stuff (for me) that wasted lots of valuable ram on my system. Things like the sidebar which may be useful for some are absolutely useless to me. Besides that they use ram. I have decided to remove everything that I would not need to increase performance on the system.
This tips might also be useful to those users who use an old computer with Windows Vista. My Vista installation is using about 430 megabytes of Ram in default state with only one instance of Internet Explorer 7 running as well. The following paragraphs contain a list of changes that I made and their effect on the system.
- Disabling the Sidebar
- Changing the Design to Windows Classic
- Changing the Background image to one color
- Disabling the Windows Firewall and Bitdefender
Those changes alone dropped the ram usage by 60 megabytes to 370 with one Internet Explorer window open. There are many settings that can still be tweaked to gain even more performance, for instance removing unnecessary services and indexing. I will take a look at those in the coming days.
The question of course remains why you would like to change to Vista if you disable everything “new” that Vista offers. I personally think that it introduces lots of gimmicks that freeware on XP offered for years. And if it is security that you want you should take a look at Linux instead.
Related posts:
Windows Vista Performance and Tuning Guide10 Simple Ways to Speed up Windows Vista
Windows Vista Sidebar Styler
Speed up Vista
WPF Performance Fix for Windows Vista and XP
Fix for poor network performance in Windows Vista
Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
Vlite Windows Vista Configuration Tool
6 Responses to “Increasing the performance of Windows Vista”
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Improve Windows Vista Memory Performance
Martin over at gHacks has managed to get his hands on a copy of Windows Vista through his day job, and he’s already setting about getting to grips with the new OS.
So far, he doesn’t appear to be very impressed with the new visual eye-candy… -
[...] More: gHacks [...]
I just want to thank you for the great work you’ve been doing here. I regularly follow your site and enjoy reading it. Keep it up.
omg :|
430MB ram? what for?
I think I wont switch fast, even if I like software news.
Windows XP uses aoub 100MB of ram, and all programs are runs on it.. so what for waste another 300MB of ram?
For shiny windows and buttons?
Thinker is right what for waisting extra 300MB RAM , since XP takes 100MB of RAM.
After reading the comments, I’m even more upset that my new Asus laptop with 4gb of ram, using Vista Premium is requiring so much ram to operate, betweeen 1 and 2 gb, even though I’m not running a lot of useless things on the surface. Same thing with my friend’s Toshiba. It seems too, that the more ram one has, the more ram gets used. Not sure why. I haven’t yet learned enough about which services I can safely stop, as I’m sure this would help. Any suggestions would be appreciated.