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Follow these tips to boost Vista performance

Even with tweaks Vista is appreciably slower than XP. I am running a new (thank God) 3 month old Dell e520, w/ 1.5GB ram and a 3.08 ghz cpu, and have tweaked Vista Basic (no Aero), as i also did for my other Windows OSes, 9x and XP, eliminating certain unneeded start up apps and Services, reducing Indexing (not in 9x), using classic menus and defragging, etc. But Vista still takes over a minute to boot up (from choosing the OS to loading all of the few start up programs) versus 35 secs for similarly tweaked and loaded XP on the same (dual booted) PC. And 60 secs for a loaded 98se on an old 650mhz PC. And XP is easily noticeably faster in performance as well, and does everything i need Vista to do and usually better. Vista is even slower than the old 98 in launching folders and system configuration options. Howeverm Vista does have more advanced text to voice than XP, and even voice to text capabilities, if you need them.

I am still glad i have Vista, but i would not recommend upgrading to Vista from XP, unless you really have a problem with security (UAC is turned off in mine). I do not think it will be as long as it took for Vista for MS to comes up with another OS.

You would think by now that Microsoft should be able to write an OS that optomises itself, to get the best out of the hardware. To carry out all this tweaking for one machine is OK, but to do it on a number of PCs (we have 7500!), even with tools is time-consuming. With 100s of man-years development in OSs over the years, why can't it optomise itself?

no...take 7500 of them - you have introduced the allowance for random PC settings. Bad Idea PeterSS, it's gonna blow!

I installed Vista business on my 9 month old PC and the performance was so abysmal that I took it off.
I went through a similar process to Deb Shinder and it would still hang for 45 minutes, so I gave up the unequal struggle.
What is the point of buying fast hardware and pairing it with an OS that makes it run like a ZX80 on Prozac?
I shall stick with XP until I buy my next PC, by then we users should have sorted out the issues that Microsoft have been unable to.
If you want a self-optimising OS, go for Linux.

I have been running Vista since final beta. No I din't put it on an off the shelf computer. You need to understand tht what you buy in the bib box stores is motly junk. Sure it may have the latest CPU and enough memory BUT it is what this is connect to that makes the difference. I have upgraded many of those machines with new motherboards and used the same CPU and gotten a performance increase of 50% plus in every case. These machines are built for price points not performance or reliability. So a nine month old box thatwas built for a price point won't be good Vista system. It was barely a good XP system. Older DELLs and HPs, etc. are not going to run Vista with good perforamnce or reliability. What these companies use to build these "toys" is the lowest of the low end and DELL is the worst of all of them. Go to a place where quality is more important than price and hae them build you a system and you'll get a system that first will be trouble free and it will be built to take advantage of the features of the operating system. And you probably won't have to throw it away in a year or two but be abble to upgrade it reasonably for whatever comes in the near future.

Anyone with a bit of sense can build a PC optimised to run Vista, but it is supposed to be a general purpose OS. Going from XP to Vista was like hitting a brick wall.
At the moment it's all eye candy and no performance.
PS When I put Vista on the PC it was barely 3 months old. My HP wouldn't even run it though the Vista advisor said that there were no problems.
It's about time MS realized that most people are not prepared to buy new PCs just because they have a new piece of untested software to rip us off with.
I stick by my guns, I will not use Vista until MS address the problems people in the real world are facing.

As a gaming enthusiast, I built my latest "geek" box with Vista in mind. Vista Ultimate. The box is a Thermaltake water cooled case (SLI power supply) ASUS deluxe mobo, E6600 dual core, 2gig DDR2 RAM, 1066 FSB, 2 ATI X1950 graphic processors in Crossfire mode (2 cards to one Monitor). I have no performance issues with Vista Ultimate running all the bells and whistles. Deb is very good, but most of what she is recommending is fairly pedestrian stuff. Defrag the disk weekly? Why? Unless you are installiing a ton of software on the hard drive with tons of data to be accesed constantly, it won't really help. Files won't be that fragmented. The fact is: MS has designed an O/S that needs beefier hardware than most people currently have at their disposal. Turning off the bells and whistles (Aero, side bar, etc.) will help. But, the bottom line is at this point one needs a fairly high end machine to run it with all that stuff. My problem with Vista remains the same: DRIVER issues. I cannot get it to recognize and use my Ipod. Which XP has no problems with. My installation of Vista seems to have issues with many USB devices. This is a typical MS screw up. One step forward...two steps back. If you are going to run Vista at this point in time..be prepared for the pain. And have a beefy machine (gaming rigs are the best right now) if you plan on running it with all the bells and whistles. That is the best way to have a decent Vista experience.

My pc is much the same as yours but without the crossfire installation.

I have no issues at all with my 5G iPod. It, and iTunes work perfectly with Vista and I am very happy with the performance. In addition I have 7 USB ports on my machine that are all full and all work perfectly so this may point to your machine / setup rather than Vista.

Not a criticism of your post, more some troubleshooting info

What is it with everybody? I installed Vista as a duel boot on my existing XP machine (3Ghz HT, 3 Gig Ram, 512MB ATI X1900) and it runs much faster than the XP installation. Both are on individual but identical (in make & type) disks.

Not saying it is better but not slower.

You must have exactly the spec of PC that MS used to develop Vista.
3 gig of RAM isn't exactly common.
What annoyed me most was task manager showing system idle at 99% and I couldn't even move the mouse, for 45 minutes.

Indeed I very much am!

I would say a new system would come with at least 2GB these days!

i have to agree I'm not slowing down at all.

in fact I'm running a lot faster.

now to be truthful when I installed my security suite I slowed down but I knew what to do.

I turned off windows defender' windows firewall' UAC' and windows security center'.

as the software I use is much better and uses a lot of resources.

but after that this system flys.

and every time I install software like acrobat reader or something.

I fire up autoruns and turn off all the crap they try and load at start up that does not need to start with the system.

this system is only a year old but it's running well.

and I did at ram to it.

ram is so cheap now days I don't care what OS your running more ram is all ways better.

and with vistas SuperFetch it is good to have more memory.

and like I said memory is cheap now days.

Why use it then?

Vista may not be slower if it is on properly configured hardware, but most people do not have the money/know how to build/purchase a system.

To the average user vista will seem slower, because they are buying it and running it on a PC that would be recommended for xp, but will barely run Vista. This is usually the problem, because I have helped a number of home users upgrade their "NEW" PCs to better run vista. Most of the desktops I see come with as little as 1GB ram, and they are using integrated video cards(which in all cases that I have seen eats up the ram).

So yes vista is "Slower" on most packaged systems, because they tend to be grossly underpowered for the beast that is Vista.

As a side note I would like to say that your rig is what most people would not buy in the stores, because they usually are on a tight budget.

I've heard the same complaining when XP came out and people upgraded from Windows 2000. The problem right now is that Vista is not truly designed for the hardware available right now. With all the enhancements put into the product for security and stability it will cause more CPU cycles and more demand for resources.

That's interesting, because I have a 3+ year old Toshiba Satellite A60-122 laptop and Vista Business (tweaked) runs slightly faster than XP Home (tweaked) did on the same machine. Either way, if speed is your biggest and only concern, you might as well go back to Windows 95 with no security tools: it boots up in like 15 seconds and runs quite fast, but don't come complaining later that it's always crashing and/or you have to format your drive every month due to malware. It's a metter of choice and priorities. I value security over speed, maybe you and others do otherwise. I would (and do) recommend Vista to anyone, although I it's probably smart to wait for SP1 to be out (even though Vista SP0 > XP SP2). And yes, it won't be as long as it took for Vista for MS to come up with another OS, but that has nothing to do with Vista's quality (and it certainly has), but with a strategic change/push inside Microsoft to shorten their products' (and especially Windows) life-cycles.

For the more skepticals (and there are lots of them when talking about a Microsoft product being anything other than a huge piece of bloatware junk), Vista faster than XP (on the same machine, of course) is possible due to features like ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive and Superfetch.

I think the point is that many who have switched to Vista would like to go back to XP, and for good reason. I think you know it is not possible to go back to Win95 since almost no current software or hardware will run on it. As for crashes, I have personally had more with Vista than XP. This could be a problem with Vista, or perhaps with the new PC, or with it not being quite tweaked all the way, who knows for sure. One thing is clear. For some reason Vista is much slower than XP on SOME machines but not others, and it is not yet clear why. Perhaps this is a default config that might work its way out eventually, we will see.

I did all this and then some. My new Vista laptop is still much slower than my old desktop clunker which is running XP, despite the fact the desktop is older and has a slower processor and disk. I asked for a free "downgrade" to XP but HP wouldn't give me one. I am stunk with a new clunker that won't run my old software anyway.

Run XP on a 386 - what... it's slower than Windows 3.1 you say?

- go figure....

Your reply did not make sense. I am not running Vista on a 386, I am running it on a brand new machine supposedly faster than my old one with XP. Doesn't your new machine with XP or Vista run a lot faster than your old 386 with Windows 3.1? My point is I prefer XP because it is faster and has more features. XP has more features than 3.1, so you expect it to consume more resources. My Vista doesn't even have the fax capability of my XP, yet it runs slower. Nor will it run a lot of software that ran on XP.

1)Uninstall Vista
2)Install Linux

I tried dual booting with 2 of the latest Linux distros, Ubuntu and PcLinuxOS - with the latter being faster than the former -but they were still slower than XP on this Dell e520. Also, Linux too often requires learning dos type commands to do many things Windows does by GUI, as Linux forums abundantly testify. But good concept, and i hope MS allegations that it violates numerous patents is not true.

1) LOOK FOR LIFE
2) LOOK AGAIN
3) Go to 1

yes vista needs the FULL hardware, otherwise you wind up with unworkable piece of junk...

yes vista needs the FULL hardware, otherwise you wind up with unworkable piece of junk...

That's interesting, because, as I stated before here, I'm running Vista Business on a 3+ year old Toshiba Satellite A60-122 laptop with a P4 3.06 GHz, 1.2 RAM and 64 MB shared memory graphics and Vista runs smoothly (actually faster than XP did). I don't call a 747 an "unworkable piece of junk" just because I can't pilot it, but I understand not everyone uses the brain before talking.

"Why is Sony selling these systems with Vista Business installed if they won't run the interface properly?"

At least I'm not the only one thinking this. I bought a VGN-UX71 with Vista Home Premium on it and it runs like a dog. It doesn't help that they preload it with that stupid Norton AV Suite.

not simple enough for me I'm afraid

I have felt the pain of an unresponsive Windows (XP SP2) dual core 2.8 Ghz machine that task manager reports is 99% idle but the disk light is constantly on. After applying all the standard tweaks the thing still ran like a pig.

Tried cranking up FileMon from Sysinterals and by the time the thing loaded whatever was happening 10 minutes ago when the thrashing started had long since gone. I suspected bad disk driver(s). Granted there wasn't a lot of memory in the machine but it was basically unusable (20 minutes to boot and start the browser). I wiped the hard drive and put Linux on and all the problems went away. The memory management is so much better on Linux .

I suspect a big part of the problem is, as was mentioned earlier, that MS developers write their software on machines that have much more RAM than what most home or business
users have and so don't see the performance degradation that is so common.

i think these r common methods for each os.....n also vista provides this help n support with its package....

This is ********, Vista is f***ing rubbish from beginning. And we all know it.

I'm still amazed that the manufacturers have been releasing their systems with totally inadequate resources for Vista. The minimum memory requirements were just that, minimums. They've always done this to shave price points off their systems, but the spread has been much worse with Vista systems. Everyone seems to be willing to blame only MS for the performance of Vista, but the mass-manufacturers have really hobbled the OS with their trash entry level systems.

there is one tip can improve your score Adjust your colour settings to 16 Bit instead of 32 bit i had sony laptop set this way and it improved the score from 3.1 to 3.5

if anyone wants Vista to look like XP or Win98,by all means disable the visual features. As long as you arent running a legacy system and have at least 2 Gigs of RAM installed,there is NO reason you cant keep your Vista looking like Vista AND it run decent. RAM is very cheap these days so that shouldnt be a concern. Next,get a dedicated graphics card. Those 2 upgrades are all anyone needs to have a Vista-ran system without sacrificing the visuals that separate it from the rest. Second piece of advice?please by all means,learn more about your computer than where the power button is and what the IE icon does,the more you learn about your system the better off you will be and the more money you will save.. And NEVER go to a place like Wal-Mart,Geek Squad or some such place and take the person?s advice like it is Gospel,remember that no matter how much they know,they are SALESPEOPLE above anything. They will make you feel like you need their entire product line and services to make your system run good. In short,they are very knowledgeable,but if they can make a few extra bucks due to your ignorance,they will. No one is too old or too young to learn what makes thier systems tick.

Once you have the system up and running as you want it, the best thing you can do to improve your bootup times is to never shut down the system, but rather use the "Hibernate" or "Sleep" function of the system.

To that end I use a gadget called "Control System with Clock" and close the system from there. Security is still available, because when the system is turned back on, you still have to enter your password to access your computer (unless you disable that, but why would you want to?).

With "sleep", simply touching any key on the keyboard wakes up the computer and you're off and running even faster than from hibernation.

Vista is a resource hog. PERIOD. Compared to Windows XP, Vista creates twice as many background processes and uses three times as much RAM *just to boot up*. For the average user, these "features" are USELESS - they just wanna surf the 'net, type a letter, run a spreadsheet and read their e-mail!!!! The suggestion to "turn off the [Vista] bling" really suggests that you should be running Windows XP. Anthony Maw, Vancouver, Canada www.anthonymaw.com

You say that you can change the location of the paging file - but not how to do it.