Speed Up Vista

I could not install this program on my computer using Vista as I have a 64 bit system. It will only work on 32 bit systems. Any ideas?

EDITOR'S NOTE: You couldn't install which program?

First, I heartily agree with your recommendation about virtual memory being a static size rather than "growable". This eliminates pagefile fragmentation, which can indeed slow you down.

But that's all I agree with.

4GB of virtual memory for a 2GB system is probably excessive. Different program mixes require different amounts of virtual memory. Some light use systems probably don't need any. Although the only cost of having too much virtual memory is only disk space, perhaps disk space is limited on the user's system. Certainly a better general recommendation is to start with 2GB of virtual memory and increase it only if Windows complains it needs more.

Re Aero, Vista will only turn it on if your hardware is fast enough. So Aero will NOT be the reason your system is slow. Neither are all those services you're telling people to turn off. There ARE a handful of reasons peoples systems are slow:

1. Malware

Viruses and/or Spyware is the number one reason people's computers are slow. Vista comes with Windows Defender, so as along as you keep it updated, you shouldn't have a problem with Spyware. And most computers come with an anti-virus program. So as long as you keep that updated, you should be free of viruses, too. But your anti-virus program could be slowing you down all by itself. Which brings me to item #2.

2. Your Anti-Virus Program

Unfortunately, most anti-virus programs today are so poorly written (and poorly conceived) that they take your brand new Core 2 Duo Vista x64 4GB machine and make it slower than XP. I'm talking specifically about Symantec, Norton and McAfee (remember when McAfee was the best?). Worse still, if you have more than one anti-virus program installed, that'll make your system REALLY slow.

The only anti-virus program I use and recommend is NOD32. Just the anti-virus program, not the Smart Security package. You'll be amazed how much faster your computer will run just by making this one change. And no, I don't work for them.

3. Windows Search

Vista has a search mechanism built in that it relies on for lots of the new niceties. Up until recently, this search was a dog, performance-wise. A few months ago, M$ released Windows Search 4. One of the big improvements was performance, and this also makes a big difference.

If you use Windows Update (and you should for Vista, not XP), Windows Search should have been automatically updated.

4. Slow network file copies

This one's tougher. Vista uses a different algorithm to copy files - XP dumps the file into virtual memory and lets normal paging write the pages back to disk, while Vista "improves" this by using a static memory buffer. The result is that Vista just copies file slower.

However, Vista SP1 introduced a further atrocity: it throttles your network speed to just 10 packets per millisecond when you have multimedia playing. So if you try copying a file while your music is playing in Media Player, forget it.

But fear not, M$ has a way to turn this network throttling off. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948066 for how.

People have other problems with software that comes pre-installed on their computers, but how do you tell people what to uninstall? I do it for people, but I don't have a formula. I do know, though, that Sonic DLA (part of Easy Media Creator) is bad, so I uninstall that and install Nero 8.

Sorry for the lengthy post, Bob, but I really needed to set you straight.

This was written on a new $1200 VAIO laptop running Vista Home Premium x64. Even this system ran poorly until I made my changes above. Now it flies, and I'm (mostly) happy with Vista.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Thanks for your comments. But you were mostly agreeing with me! (turn off Aero, get good malware protection, turn off windows search/indexing, and get rid of unneeded software)

As for Aero, there ARE video cards that "support" it but they are under-powered and run Aero very poorly. And if you don't have an extra 2GB of disk space laying around on a Vista machine, you have MUCH bigger problems than simply needing to speed up your machine.

I was hopeful when I saw the title of this article, but as I went through the list of tweaks, I saw that I had already tried most of them and Vista's slow performance is still TOTALLY annoying. Why do I sometimes have to wait 5-10 seconds for Vista to respond to my Delete command or a right-click on a file? Why does it make me go through two permission screens to copy some files to another location? Why do some shortcuts on the Start menu not work (I have to Open File Location and run the file from there)?

I like some of the file mangagment features - tags and so on - but often I wonder whether I shouldn't have stuck with XP.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The sluggish performance you described is most often due to limited RAM memory. Increasing RAM will give you more bang for the buck than all the other things combined.

I've done the services.msc tweaks in the past and I'm not really sure that they help much with general performance and they put many users at risk of messing up their systems. Turning off unnecessary services does help in boot up times though.

On the issue with Aero, I totally agree that turning it off speeds up the system performance and I *have* a good graphics card (Geforce 8800 GTX w/ 320 MB RAM) and 2 GB of RAM. That tip alone probably would save a lot of people unnecessarily removing Vista and installing XP (and money) if they can do without the eye candy.

Vista can safely be sped up by 9.81 m/s every single second. After you run out of air, upgrade to Ubuntu.

Hi Bob,

I bought a computer 3 months ago and have yet to be able to burn music,i called the store tonight and told them my problem,they said maybe the burner isn't working,how can i find out if my burner is or isn't working.Thanks Betty

EDITOR'S NOTE: You don't say what happened when you tried to use the burner, so it's hard to guess at the problem.

I use Gmail and belong to two Internet discussion groups: one is a "google group" the other is a "yahoo group." Whenever I send a message to either group it never shows up in my email from the group....but I see it if I go to the website of the discussion group and OTHER people get my message in their email. This started happening a couple weeks ago..... Is this a Gmail problem???

EDITOR'S NOTE: I think so... when the message comes back, it may look like a dupe of the one you sent.

Trying to optimize my Windows Vista System as I did earier with Windows XP, I used the vista flavor of scandisk (chkdsk?) and I defragmented the hard disk. Since those utilities run in a way very different than their Windows XP relatives (they take a very long time to run), mi question is: Are they actually useful?

EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't think the hard drive utilities are significantly changed from XP to Vista. You should continue to use them, I'd say.

I feel I'm asking a foolish question, I have always been told in the lessons on computers, not to download anything on the Internet. Is this safe and what makes yours different?

EDITOR'S NOTE: That's a bit like telling people not to open their mailbox, because there might be a letter bomb inside. There are plenty of safe downloads online, but of course there is some bad stuff as well. Why are the ones I've suggested okay? Because I've checked them out carefully and found them to be safe.

About Vista speed. I have gone to system properties, then to system protection, and unchecked the box for drive c:. This turns off the system restore, which I have seen as big as 50 GB. Sure the system restore could be of value, but I have seen virus's hiding in there. Do you think this is OK?

EDITOR'S NOTE: System restore is a safety net. I'd feel uncomfortable without it, but it's your choice. If you have a good up-to-date anti-virus program, it should catch things before they can be rolled into a restore point.