Windows is the most popular OS is the world. Almost 80% PC users have windows installed in their machine. One of the main problems with windows is performance issue. As we add new programs to our OS the machine gets slower and slower. Windows Vista in particular utilizes high resources and many complain my pc is running slow. New windows OS(Vista and Windows 7) requires a very Hi-Fi configured system to run smoothly. But still there is some performance lag while using it after 3-4 months after installation. You can increase the performance of your windows Vista machine using these steps. Please be careful while you do something. Check twice whether you need to follow this step or not. These steps will solve performance problems and you won't search for these keywords 'faster vista boot', 'how speed up windows', 'how to make computer fast', 'how to speed up windows vista', 'improve vista speed', 'increase vista performance', 'slow loading windows' etc.

Now try these Windows 7/ vista speed tweaks

#1 Over-Clocking CPU and Hardware Upgrade

- how to make computer fast?

The best way to increase your system speed is just upgrade your hardware. A 2Ghz processor, 4Gb ram, 320 Gb HDD, 512 MB dedicated graphics card would be quite enough for Windows vista/7. I’m pretty sure Vista/7 will run smoothly on computer having these hardware specsJ. There is another way to get most out of your CPU – CPU over-clocking. But do it at your own risk.

#2 Disable AERO Theme

- increase vista performance

- increase windows 7 performance

Aero user interface squeezes your graphics or video card to its maximum. So why can’t we just avoid the Windows 7 or windows vista aero? if we care more about speed and performance in Windows 7. So Disabling the Aero in Windows 7/vista certainly adds an extra speed boost to it.

#3 Turn off visual effects

- slow loading windows

- xp extremely slow

If your hardware is well capable of handling these effects then just neglect this. Otherwise just make sure you don’t skip this step. You can choose which visual effects to turn off, one by one, or you can let Windows choose a bunch for you. There are 20 visual effects you can control, such as the transparent glass look, the way menus open or close, and whether shadows are displayed.

Go to Start button >> Control Panel >> System and Maintenance >> Performance Information and Tools. Click Adjust visual effects. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. Choose effects that you want and uncheck those which you feel will make your system slow.

#4 Remove Unwanted windows programs

- windows extremely slow

- speed up windows 7

Kick out the unwanted junks. Open Control Panel and click Uninstall a Program to launch Vista's Uninstall or Change a Program Window. In the Tasks pane on the left, click Turn Windows Features On or Off.Check the list of features. Each feature is preceded by a checkbox which, if filled, indicates the feature is installed. If you hover the mouse over a feature, a help tooltip appears to tell you what it is.

For eg. Some of the games, XPS Viewer (under .NET Framework 3.0), Remote Differential compression (a network optimizer),Windows Ultimate Extras…

- speed up login

- speed up menu

- speed up pc windows

Uninstall all the unwanted programs installed on your machine. You might have installed many programs which you may no longer be using. There are programs that utilize high system resources such as database engine and all. If you are no longer using it, you can straight away remove as you have the option to install it any time.

#6 Minimum Start-Up programs

- faster vista boot

- slow startup windows

- speed up windows boot time

- speed up login

By default most of the application you installed uses this facility to start the application right when the windows starts. So these programs are loaded in memory and they may do some background processing which again utilizes lots of resources. You just check system usage. Remove all unnecessary start-up programs. You can do it by opening msconfig (Just go to run and type ‘msconfig’ and hit enter)

#7 Clean up your hard disk

- to speed up process

- to speed up windows 7/Vista

- to speed up windows xp

Clean your hard disk once in week. There will be lot of temp files saved on your machine for various purposes. You can safely delete all these temp files. OS create temp files for purposes like virtual ram, internet tem file saving, application tem files, hibernate etc. There many free tools available on internet which is much better than the one available in windows. You can access windows disk clean up by just right click on drive and click ‘disk clean’

#8 Defragment your hard drive

Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startups and shutdowns. It is important to keep your disks defragmented and optimized as much as possible. Windows default defragmenter is not so effective. There are many free defragmentation software available. You can use any one of them. I use disk defraggler.

#9 Disable services you don’t need

- vista speed tweaks

- speed up process

- speed up the process

- to speed up process

Windows has more than 100 services running quietly in the background with names such as Network Access Protection Agent and Shell Hardware Detection. These typically launch when your computer is started and they run until your computer is shut down. Some secure Microsoft services cannot be disabled, but most others can be. Many software companies also install their own services, some of which you can disable to conserve memory and processor power. You should wisely decide which all services to be disabled. Here is hub related to this topic. Learn from here which services to be disabled to speed up Windows 7.

#10 Restart regularly

There is a growing trend that, internet addicts, they don’t shutdown their system, they are 24x7 online, I’m one of them..LOL. Its always better to restart your system regularly. This will keep your system healthy and will also increase the speed of the system.

ReadyBoost is one of the more appealing features in Vista. Put simply, it uses a solid state memory disk as an extra disk memory cache.

To take advantage of Ready Boost, find the fastest USB flash drive you can find and plug it in. AutoPlay will pop up a dialog offering to use it for ReadyBoost. Just enable it and you're done.

Microsoft suggests that you use a USB drive roughly the same size as the amount of RAM you have.

Remember increase RAM is way better than this. Still it gives some performance boost.

#12 Disable Index Search(If u don’t require it!)

One of the feature that I like most of windows Vista is Indexed search. But it utilizes a lot of resources. If you turn off this service you are sure to give some performance boost to your system. To disable indexing of files just go to my computer, right click on C: drive, go to the General tab, and uncheck Index this drive for faster searching, select Include subfolders and files.

 

#13 Disable DOS-era 8.3 file-name compatibility

Windows vista uses NTFS rather than older FAT32 format. Still the new windows os provides backward compatibility. Still they giv support to old 8.3 file-name convention of DOS and early versions of Windows. You can speed up your file accesses a bit by disabling this feature. To do so, open the Registry Editor as described in the previous tip and navigate to and select this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

 

#14 Disable Last Modified

People rarely use this service. May be only 1 in lakh. If you belong to remaining 99,999 you can disable this feature.

Start by opening the Registry Editor as described above. Navigate to and select this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Double-click NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, change the DWORD value from 0 to 1, and click OK.

 

#15Get rid of the sidebar

Sidebar is a new feature that Microsoft introduced in their Vista OS, which is very handy. Sometimes it is very useful. If you don’t require sidebar you can either undock sidebar or remove unwanted gadgets on sidebar. Try removing some of the gadgets. Keep only the required.

 

#16 Regularly scan for virus, spywares, Trojans etc..

Here you can argue with me. Whenever I install an anti- virus, anti-spyware program it makes ma system dead slow. Yeah its truth. But new anti-virus programs are very fast and you should make sure that you have completed the ‘The Full System scan option’ once after installation. This will make antivirus program bit more fast and that performance lag won’t be there.

 

I will keep updating this Hub. Whenever I get new tweak I will publish it here. Now go and get most out of your PC.