Authored by Kumara Velu in Computer Software
Published on 02-15-2009

Have you been running Vista for a while and noticed that the speed of your operating system is not as fast as when you were using Windows XP? Don’t think of reverting to Windows XP yet before considering some tips that may help you overcome your problem. You may also want to try these tips out first before considering hardware upgrades to boost the speed of your Windows Vista.

Disable Unwanted Services

You never know what services are running in the background until you conduct a check. Go to Start – Run – and type in services.msc. You will see a list of services running in the background. You’ll also notice that you don’t need some of them. Go to Startup type and select Disabled. Examples of services that you don’t really need are: Tablet PC Input Service, Distributed Link Tracking Client, Secondary Logon and Remote Registry, among others. If you’re unsure as to whether you can disable a service, do a search for it over the Net to get additional information.

Speeding up Vista Start up

Does your machine take a long time to start? This could be due to numerous applications starting up automatically when you boot your computer. More often than not, you don’t need most of these programs to start automatically. You can use the System Configuration Utility to disable such applications. Use the instant search feature from the Vista start menu and type `system’. Press ENTER and choose Startup. Uncheck those applications that you don’t want starting automatically when Vista starts.

Defrag Your Hard Disk

If you’re always installing and uninstalling programs or moving files around, your hard disk becomes fragmented. Defragmenting your hard disk will bring the scattered files together and this speeds up file access. In Vista, the defrag process is automatic. Your system is configured to defragment your hard disk weekly. This is a boon for the forgetful. But then the defragmentation process itself could be the cause of a slow system. Your system will slow down if Vista is defragmenting while you’re working with your PC. You can turn off the defrag scheduler so that it doesn’t come on when you’re at work. Use the manual mode instead so that you have the flexibility to turn it on when you’re not using your computer. To defrag in the manual mode, go to My Computer, select the disk drive and right click. Choose Properties and click on the Tools tab and go to the Defragment Now option and click on Defragment.

Clean Up Your Hard Disk

Unnecessary applications filling up your hard disk may also cause your system to slow down. An alternative to Vista’s Add/Remove Programs option is CCleaner. It’s a freeware that helps you dump unwanted programs easily and quickly. It does a more thorough job than Vista’s built-in program removal utility.

vLite

This freeware speeds up Vista by using an option many may not fancy. It removes Vista’s default applications which you may not really need. vLite removes such applications as Windows Media Player, Wallpapers, Windows Photoviewer and MSN applications, among others. The opinion is that you can replace them with freeware applications that don’t hog your system resources. A word of caution though. The changes vLite makes are permanent. So, think twice before exercising this option.