Vista’s arrival invited the wrath of unforgiving Microsoft critics who had previously scorned XP for its memory intensive interface and confusing differences. Though, soon our transition from 98 or ME to XP was a smooth one, just took getting used to some subtle differences. Then came Vista, and the boat was rocked again.

Why? Well, Vista has some very memory intensive routines going on that slow the PC down and generally causes issues. Most noticeably, when a set of applications is open and no fine tuning to Vista has been applied, users experience – crashes, peripheral failures and general network annoyances.

Microsoft addressed the issue and even prepared a PDF on the various methods to speed up Vista machines as complaints increased for users of Vista Premium. The PDF can be downloaded here.

I would say from personal experience of Vista this past year that 5 of them are essential requiring no internal hardware upgrades and should not be overlooked. So to make things easier for the new Vista user, here they are:

1. ReadyBoost is a new feature that adds a secondary volatile cache to support the paging file size. This not only adds another memory device but utilizes a faster memory cache as flash memory access is faster than hard drive memory; though only a small improvement occurs in memory optimization. Once you plug in your USB 2.0 drive, Vista will state that it can be used with ReadyBoost. This allows the paging file size to be managed externally and not from the hard drive and will help the general machine speed.

2. UAC (User Account Control) caused me real stress the first time I encountered it. It adds a level of security which disables the running of applications unless you confirm it from dialog boxes that pop up every time you wish to open something. That is horrible and it slows the PC. To turn it off, go to your Control Panel, type UAC in the search bar, open UAC and turn it off there.

3. Clean your hard disk up with Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter. You will find these in Accessories->System Tools or right click the HDD icon in My Computer, and go to Properties. Disk Cleanup will remove log files and temporary files that can eat up space. You should also defrag your PC each month. Fragmentation works by marking available space when a file is deleted but that space may not be big enough for the next file written to that space, so part of the file is placed elsewhere. Over time this slows the PC considerably so run Defrag each month to keep your system fragmentation optimized.

4. How many services do you need? Right click the system tray (bottom right, on the time), select Task Manager, and go to the Services tab. I tend to turn off any services that I am not using. If unsure, ask a savvy IT colleague you know. Also, check the Performance tab, click on Resource Monitor. Click through each tab and take a look at the Average CPU Usage, can any of those programs be terminated? How many USB devices are attached to your PC?

5. If none of this has helped, and only if that’s the case, then next check the indexing service. This helps searching generally and is best left on; go to My Computer, right click and select Properties, go to the General tab and uncheck ‘Index this drive for faster searching’. Also, the lack of improvement could be due to graphical settings. Go to Control Panel, then Appearance and Personalization, and turn off the sidebar or/and switch to the Classic menu in Taskbar and Start Menu properties.

Outside of these points, do not forget the usual spyware checks as this will impact performance no matter what tweaks to your Vista settings are applied. This is the usual state of the problem if you have Trojans sending packets of data to its recipient.

Your Vista machine should be a much faster system once you have tried these tips.