When Microsoft developed Vista, they forgot that with so much of eye candy, it will become bulky and may even take minutes if not hours, to run simple processes like paint or Word. But thank god, a little bit of tweaking, and your Windows vista will again run smoothly. These are some of the tips that will help you to speed up vista and run the regular programs without any problem.

• Unclutter Your Hard Drive

Like me, you may have installed one software or the other at some time when you needed it, but no longer use it. It makes sense to uninstall those unnessasary software and free up as much hard disk space as you can. You can use CCleaner for that purpose which is faster and more useful than Vista’s default Add/Remove application.

• Turn Off Unnecessary Services

Some processes in Vista and other Windows operating systems start at every boot up, without you even knowing. These delay the boot time and thus decrease the performance of your system. The biggest thing is, some of them are unnecessary. So, they can be disabled to increase performance of Vista.

To disable them, go to Start > Run, type services.msc and hit ENTER. Double-click on the service you want to get rid of and change the startup type to Disable. You can disable almost any Service there, but make sure that you don’t disable the following services:

* Superfetch
* Task Scheduler
* Windows Audio
* Multimedia Class Scheduler
* Plug and Play
* Windows Driver Foundation.



• Keep Your Memory Clear

Use the free application Instant Memory Cleaner to free as much of the physical memory as can be possible. And remember the golden rule of speed, “less clutter means more speed”.

• Defragment Your Hard Drive

You may have heard about this quite a large number of times, but this is true. De fragmentation increases the performance of hard disk and thus making Vista run quickly and smoothly. You you have ever tried to defrag your hard disk, you may have noticed that many of the features with disk defragmenter which were present in XP are missing in Vista. So you can try a better defragmenter called Disk Defrag, which gives you a nice drive map and other advanced features.

• Use ReadyBoost

ReadyBoost is one of the best features in Vista. It uses a solid state memory disk as an extra disk memory cache.

To take advantage of ReadyBoost, 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.

• Use vLite

vLite disables many of Vista’s default system components like Windows Media Player, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Viewer, MSN components, Wallpapers and SlideShow.

Using vLite will save chunks of disk space, but the changes it makes to your machine are permanent, so use it if you know what you are doing.

• Get Rid of Eye Candy

Vista’s snazzy UI design is easy on the eye but hard on the processor. But you don’t need to empty your pockets and buy new hardware. Give these tips a try first and see if they improve your Vista experience.

* Get rid of Aero – Go to the Window Color and Appearance panel (right click the desktop and choose personalize) and click the link to “Open classic appearance properties for more color options. Select an option other than Aero.

* For a less radical option just turn off the “glass transparency” setting which seems to be the source of much of Aero’s memory usage.

* Another less-drastic solution is to turn off the animations and other visual effects.

* Disable the Sidebar — Widgets are memory hogs and getting rid of them will help speed up Vista.

• Update regularly

This is the most essential tip. You should always update all your drivers and software not only in Windows Vista but also in all other operating systems.

• Use RAM Boosters

RAM Booster Pro v5.0.1 will automatically free up your RAM without the need to restart your PC. For example if you have just ended playing Call of Duty 4 and you system seems it is a Pentium 2 PC, just run this software and free up the used RAM and boost the system performance.

• Use GameThrust

This is a Paid software. GameThrust will boost the performance of your system and also of the internet connection. You can optimize its setting to get the most of your PC. You still get a trial to check this software before you buy.