Speed up Vista

When I first got Windows Vista about 7 or so months ago it did seem to be pretty slow compared to Windows XP.

After checking out all the online tech websites I followed all the tweaking tips such as disabling background services, turning of animations and visual effects, using the Vista Power Saver application and various ‘speed-up-windows’ programs.

Since then I have reinstalled a couple of times and discovered that all these tips are essentially useless on a decent, fairly new computer.

I could notice no performance improvement at all with all visual themes enabled then with them disabled and I got near identical battery life with aero on as I did off. I’m going to call this as complete bollocks:

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This tiny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features. Running in task bar with private workset of 5.5M and 0% CPU it will do all work for you, by enabling and disabling customizable features when power source changed or battery power fall under certain percent.

All you need is the advanced Vista Power Options and you can save a lot more battery power. As far as disabling background services go I will simply echo Ed Bott’s advice:

That is breathtakingly bad advice. It is as if the automotive columnist in your local newspaper told you to open the hood of your car and start disconnecting wires and hoses one at a time to see which ones made your car run faster or quieter or smoother. It might be hours or days or even weeks before you run a program that requires the service you disabled, at which point you might have no clue that the disabled service is the cause of the nonfunctional program.

Here’s the reality: On an otherwise healthy PC running Windows Vista, disabling most built-in Windows services is extremely unlikely to have any noticeable effect on memory usage, startup or shutdown time, or system performance. On the contrary, you are more likely to create problems by disabling services. Not to mention the amount of time you will surely waste and the productivity you will lose with all that starting and stopping and rebooting and web searching.

Any services which are causing significant slow downs on your computer are likely to originate from a third-party source such as Nero’s background indexing. Windows Defender may also cause some slowdown with it’s daily scan.

And lastly the system tweaks, many of these will make some small improvements, but they largely apply to specific actions and are not connected to overall performance itself.

What is your opinion on this? Am I wrong? Did these things make a difference to the performance of Vista on your computer?

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