Increasing performance vista

There are a lot of visual enhancements that make Vista look like Vista, such as the animations when minimizing and maximizing windows, fading or sliding menus, shadows under the menus and mouse pointer, and thumbnails of graphics files instead of dull icons.

However, all this bling uses resources, and if performance is your priority, the operating system will run faster without them. On the Visual Effects tab, you can customize these settings individually, turning off the ones you don't want, to help speed performance. Or you can disable all of the visual effects by clicking the Adjust For Best Performance option. Vista has a much-improved search function, but it's dependent on indexing the files and programs on your hard disk so they can be found quickly.

When the indexing process is running, however, it can slightly slow down other programs you're trying to run at the same time. You can select the locations you want to index; fewer locations will result in less indexing and thus better overall performance. On the other hand, you'll get better search performance by indexing all locations. You can't turn the indexing feature off completely, but you can adjust locations indexed by selecting Adjust Indexing Options in the left pane of the Performance Information And Tools applet.

Fragmented files or a lot of unneeded extra files on the disk can slow down performance. Specify a drive you want to clean up, and the tool will estimate the amount of space you can recover by running the cleanup process. Defragmenting the disk rearranges data on it so that all the parts of a file are together; this allows Vista to access those files more quickly. The built-in disk defragmenter is also accessed from the System Tools menu. The defragmentation process itself can slow down your computer, so you may want to schedule it to run at a time when you aren't using the computer.

Third-party defrag utilities are also available. If you don't mind using more power, you can boost performance by setting your power settings to the High Performance option. Click the Power Options applet in Control Panel and select that choice. The sidebar is a cool feature of Vista, but if you don't use its applets, you can save some resources by disabling it.

First, right-click it and select Properties. Next, deselect the check box to start the sidebar when Windows starts. Contact your computer manufacturer or a computer technician for more information on how to purchase and install more RAM memory for your computer. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help.

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