Gravity Blue

My friend has always been complaining about his new Windows Vista PC being really slow and I couldn’t explain why was it really slow as the hardware specification were alright but the PC was still slow.

When I went to his place to give a check on his new PC, I discovered it wasn’t the new PC that was the real issue but Window Vista itself. His windows had no errors or registry errors, but the unnecessary features by Windows Vista were slowing down the PC and to fix the issue, I identified almost 10 of them. Most of them were graphics and optional utilities which were hardly used but still used most of the computer resources.

To begin with, I wouldn’t tell you guys to disable all the features I m suggesting but you can look into the features you use and might not disable them. Also, during the process if your computer starts to act weird, you can always consider restoring your computer to the previous working conditions of your choice.

You can also create a recovery point by clicking Start, type in sysdm.cpl and hit Enter. Choose System Protection, create and you can easily follow the prompts.

1 First was the Sidebar I noticed which used most of the computer resources for just viewing an analog clock, slide show viewer and RSS news feed. When I turned off the Sidebar, an amazing boost to the Vista speed was noticed. You too can turn it off by right clicking anywhere on the sidebar and select Close Sidebar. Also, uncheck “start sidebar when windows starts,” and click OK.

2. What Microsoft has added to Windows Vista was a huge amount of visual enhancements, in which the thumbnail view feature that appears when you hover the pointer over the taskbar, as well as the 3-D Flip you get when use the Alt+Tab when switching between different opened windows.

All these features are included under Aero, and you can disable it if you don’t want unwanted animations. To do it, right click on the desktop, select personalize window colour and appearance. In the window colour and appearance box, click, “Open classic appearance properties for more colour options” and you don’t see this option, then the Aero is already turned off. If you see the option, select Windows Vista Basic and click OK.

3. To cut down more of the Windows Vista visual stuff, to see more options on disabling, click Start, right click on Computer and select Properties. Select the Advanced System Properties, then Advanced tab, click the Settings button inside the performance box.

Here you will find all the visual enhancement offered by Vista like Fade or Slide menus into view, show shadows under menus and stuff. You can uncheck them all, which will boost up the speed a lot or may keep some of them if you want.

4. Most of the people I know hardly print documents over the internet, if you don’t too, then you may consider disabling internet printing client. Open Programs and Feature control panel and click the “Turn Windows features on or off” link on the left, windows features box will show up. Expand the Print Services section and there, uncheck the Internet Printing Client and click OK.

Here, system will ask you to reboot your computer, you may do it if you want or may read the rest of the article reboot at the end.
5. If you have the Vista Ultimate Edition, then you must turn off the pointless Ultimate Extras, which is a set of downloadable add-ons to Ultimate users. If you haven’t paid for the Ultimate edition then you can pretty much ignore this feature.

If you do have the Ultimate Edition, and want to turn off this unwanted feature, go to Windows Update by clicks Start, All Programs. Click view available updates and uncheck all the stuff you don’t want, mostly poker game, EFS enhancement, the DreamScene, which wastes a lot of your computer resources making a video wallpaper for you and some other useless stuff.

You can easily turn off the Windows Ultimate Extras in Windows Features dialog box which you used earlier and uncheck the Windows Ultimate Extras.

6. If you use a desktop computer for your Windows Vista, then consider disabling the tablet-oriented features which comes handy if you own a tablet PC and if you do and use this feature, then you can ignore this.
To turn off this feature, start in the Windows Features dialogue which I mentioned in the point 4, once there, see the Internet Printing Client tip above for instruction to get there, once you are there simple uncheck the Tablet PC optional component.

To complete the job, click Start, type in services and hit Enter to open the Services Window. Then find and double click Tablet PC Input services, then in start up type drop down menu, click disabled and OK.

7. Windows Vista offers a much-hyped feature called ReadyBoost, which supposedly speeds up your PC by which it creates a caching memory to a flash drive, which actually slows down your PC abit. I would really not recommend using it.

You can disable it in Services (I mentioned on the above point of getting there). Double click ReadyBoost, in the startup type drop down menu, select disabled and click OK.

8. Turning off the search indexing might slow down the searching of files to minutes but would significantly increase your PC performance.
To turn off indexing, click Start, type services and hit Enter. Double click Windows Search, in the startup type drop down menu, select disabled and click OK.

9. There is hardly anyone who uses the offline browsing feature as internet is available most of the time. If you use the Home edition, this feature is already disabled but for the Business or Ultimate edition, you can turn off the Offline Files feature by finding it in services, double click Offline Files, select startup files drop down menu and select disabled and then OK.

10. Whenever any application generates an error, Windows provides reporting the error, which might ‘might’ help the company locate the problem, but there are 110% chances that your error report joins the huge pile of error reports and hardly gets noticed, so your pc resources gets to be wasted.

I am sure, disabling most of the unwanted vista features will speed up your PC, it sure helped my friend. Do share your tips in the comments section below.

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