Guide to power up vista

I know everyone has been hating on Vista, I do not see one problem, apart from some things not working with it, but in a year or two, it'll be the other way around, and XP will be old school, won't be able to run all the latest things. Anyways, aside from programs not running, that will fix in time, but another point people have been saying, it saying that its too slow, thats because you haven't thought of doing any of these things.


PC Requirements to Run Vista;

800 MHz or better Processor
512MB Memory (at all times)
20GIG Hard Drive (most have a LOT LOT more)
The basic video cable such as a DirectX cable would benefit your computer greatly.

Of course, this is the basic requirements for the normal Vista, to run home premium you basically need double of all of this.

Thumbnails

Vista is very image based, its more of an eye candy computer, everything looks sweet, but all the cool stuff doesn't make the computer any more sufficient, it actually makes it worse.

A few things you can do to help your pc load/run faster are;

-Right click your desktop and click Personalize, then click the "Open classic appearance properties" at the bottom, and then clicking a different "color scheme" in the scroll box at the bottom, other then Windows Aero.

-Going to control panel>system>Advanced System Settings and then deselecting a few things there will greatly speed up your computer

Visual Effects

By going to control panel>folder options>view and then clicking show icons, never thumbnails is the best way to speed your computer up, I know you probably have thousands of images, and your PC every time it turns on, has to load everyone of those images, there only small... but they add up.

Unneeded services

Another thing you can do, is cancel unneeded services, you go to control panel>admin tools>services
I've read from an official Vista site, that a few services you can SAFELY disable are;

IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules
Remote Registry
UPnP Device Host
WebClient
Windows error Reporting Service
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)

Defragging

Defragging your hard drive is something you should do once a day, you can actually automate this to defrag one a week on a day+time you choose, or a daily time. By going to All Programs.Accessories>System Tools>Disk defragment. After that, change defragmentation to running once a week, to daily, and then select a time, it can defrag when your PC is turned off (I think) so set it to 4am or something similar.

Unneeded programs

Deleting unneeded programs is another thing you should learn off, open up my computer, and right click your hard drive, then click properties; After that, click the disk cleanup button. There should be some files under the words 'Files to delete", if not, skip this step and close the window, if not, you can check how much room each file takes up, and then consider deleting it, these are not personal files, they come with Vista, as addons. Keep this window open.

System Restore Points

From here, click on more options, and then under system restore, click the clean up button, it will delete ALL system restore points except your most recent one, each restore point is a compressed version of your ENTIRE computer, and these take up A TON OF ROOM.

Start menu

You probably never reliesed this, but everything in your start menu loads (the FULL program) when you turn on your computer, by deleting things from here by right clicking and clicking remove, you relieve your computer loading process, ultimately speeding up your computer turn on speed.

Side bar

I'm sure you think the desktop side bar is cool, but its not, its an extremely slow program to load, and it covers up your desktop, you can change the opacity, but its best just to remove it completely.
To do this, right click the sidebar icon next to the time (bottom right) of your pc, amd click properties, then untick "start sidebar when windows starts".

Norton Anti virus

You may think "its free" so I'll keep it, but its actually a very bad program, it lags your computer A LOT, and it doesn't do a very good job. I recommend getting AVG by downloading it .

Large Files (movies etc.)

If you download movies, animes, videos, or anything close to a GIG, its wise to store it in your 2nd drive, most computers have a regular C drive, and a Data (D) drive, if you keep your big files there, since your computer is normally ran off your C drive, your computer may be a little faster, but don't overload your 2nd drive as thats where your backups go, and you need room for backups