<- Part I || Part III ->
Welcome to part two. Last week I described in detail what I see as flaws in Windows Vista. This week I’m going to offer five simple solutions for some of the most critical problems. Next week, I’m going to provide a more effective and more long-term solution.
Alright, let’s begin with the most prevalent question about Windows Vista. Which version of Windows Vista should the average user buy? Choosing the version to purchase is a quite daunting process for most users. I mean, there are four versions available to consumers: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate. One would be tempted to get the Ultimate version because with a name like “Ultimate,” it seems like the others must truly pale in comparison. But in reality, home users won’t need Ultimate unless they want features like BitLocker Drive Encryption or Remote Desktop. And as I mentioned last week, Windows Ultimate Extras, a much-hyped feature of Windows Vista Ultimate, seems to be nothing more than a gimmick. There have been four Windows Ultimate Extras released to date, and I’ve found none of them useful: MUI Language Packs, Hold ‘Em Poker Game, Windows DreamScene, and BitLocker/EFS enhancements.
You can choose whatever Windows Vista edition you want, but I recommend that you save $100 by not buying Ultimate and instead get Home Premium. I would also recommend against getting Home Basic, unless you want a very stripped Windows Vista install, comparable to a very slim Windows XP Home Edition. Home Basic introduces other performance difficulties as well by not having the Aero Glass interface.
Some readers are likely surprised that I’d say Aero Glass actually improves performance. But according to my tests, this does seems to be the case. Having Aero Glass enabled not only enables hardware accelerated graphics for displaying your desktop, application windows, and so forth, but it also enables a compositioning window manager dubbed Desktop Window Manager. For those not familiar with compositioning window managers, they basically enable you to use special 3D effects on your desktop. 
Beryl, a compositioning manager for Linux, is famous for going hog-wild with providing dozens of plugins to enable some really crazy 3D effects. For instance, you can close a window in Gnome or KDE and instead of merely closing, it burns up in flames, smoke, and all. Many of these 3D effects are superfluous, true, but there are separate advantages to using compositioning window managers. Compositioning basically can prevent a bunch of useless work from taking place. I wrote a simple benchmark in C# for Windows Vista last week that tests how quickly windows are redrawn and moved. Two tests were run: one with Aero Glass (compositioning) enabled, one without. The test itself basically involves fifteen identical translucent (opacity scaling between 10% and 90%) windows bouncing around the screen with a black background underneath them. With Aero enabled, I got between 100 and 110 window moves per second. Without Aero enabled, the statistic dropped drastically to between 10 and 15 window moves per second. So this feature that many (including I) have outright dismissed as useless and flashy isn’t so useless after all. It will in fact improve performance for the work that most often takes place on Windows.
Tip #1: System Restore
And now it’s time to get to the meat of how to make Windows Vista a usable, small, and reliable operating system. There are five simple changes you can make in Vista that will increase speed pretty significantly. The first thing you can do is disable System Restore. If you’re not familiar with why I loathe the System Restore feature, let me explain. System Restore’s theory being that when you screw up your PC you can “roll back” to an earlier installation. Sort of an “undo” feature in the operating system. System Restore constantly, and I mean constantly, keeps backing up files. Friends of mine have complained that their computers run slowly and their hard disk is always thrashing. The reason is very simple. Every file accessed, every documented opened, every file touched gets backed up to a hidden directory. This is fine if you are dealing with letters to grandma that are a few kilobytes in size, but what about large bitmaps? Large downloads from the Internet? Yes, they get duplicated too. Your hard disk just fills up until System Restore wastes 12% of your disk space (the default percentage, anyway). The thing that makes this feature most useless is that if your computer is at a point where it actually does need a system restoration, you can’t even access the system restore feature in Windows because your system is too trashed to enable you to do so. So step one is to disable this useless feature. In Windows Vista, just click the Start button, right click Computer, and click Properties. Alternatively, hit Win+Pause on the keyboard. Once the system information window is open, click System Protection on the left. Once the dialog comes up, uncheck all the check boxes in the list and click OK.
Tip #2: Superfetch
The previous step I mentioned should save you 12% of your disk space for other uses and should offer a pretty sizable speedup. And now, on to step two. Another disk-thrashing feature that Windows Vista contains is called Superfetch. The idea behind it is that it will pre-load things that you use most often. For instance, if you run Microsoft Word on your machine very often, Superfetch will load the main executable of Microsoft Word into system RAM in case you decide to use it. This way, when you run Microsoft Word, it comes up a few seconds faster. Unfortunately, this feature is sort of unrealistic, because you may not use Microsoft Word every time you run Windows. So that file was loaded from disk for no reason. Second of all, it wastes system RAM when you’re doing tasks other than what it’s predicting you’ll do. This isn’t necessarily bad, because Windows will free this memory up if it decides something else needs it. But the worst part of all is that Superfetch will constantly thrash your hard disk. It is on a conquest to make your machine feel fast at the expense of your hard disk. If you have an especially fast hard disk, disk thrashing may not seem so bad, because disk accesses are much faster. But hard drives will die sooner if they are stressed too badly and too often. So step two is to disable this equally useless feature. To disable Superfetch, you can either download and open this registry entry file or follow these directions. Click the Start button, go to All Programs>Accessories and click Run. In the Run dialog that comes up, type regedit.exe and click OK. Now you need to browse to where Superfetch’s configuration is located. Just traverse the tree on the left in the Registry Editor window to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management \ PrefetchParameters. Right click on the EnableSuperfetch entry in the right pane, and click Modify…. Enter ‘0‘ in the box (without quotes, of course), and click OK. Please note that you may want to keep the Registry Editor open for step three. Once you restart Windows Vista, Superfetch will be disabled and you will shortly notice that there’s significantly less disk thrashing taking place.
Tip #3: Disable Paging of the Windows Executive
Step three is recommended for those with more than a gigabyte (1024MB) of system RAM, and this tweak can be applied on Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. Windows Vista tends to manage memory in a kind of silly manner by default. Since Vista has so many memory-intensive services and applications on a default install (as discussed last week), Vista may prioritize those programs for memory usage rather than the core of the Windows operating system, known as the Windows Executive. The Windows Executive may be paged to and from the hard disk quite frequently on a default install of Vista, and this causes a considerable slowdown when using most applications. There’s another registry entry available that makes it possible to keep the Windows Executive in system RAM all the time, and completely prevents it from being paged to the hard disk. The disadvantage is that if you don’t have enough system RAM, this can make applications that aren’t directly related to the operating system behave slower than normal. So I suggest you take this tweak on a case-by-case basis and see whether or not it helps you. As before, you can either download and open this registry entry file or follow these instructions. Open the Registry Editor as described in the second tweak above, and browse to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Session Manager \ Memory Management. Right click on the value in the right pane titled DisablePagingExecutive and click Modify…. Enter ‘1‘ in the data field and click OK.
Tip #4: Disable User Account Control (UAC)
User Account Control (UAC) is the feature which prompts you to “Continue”/”Cancel” or “Allow/Cancel” when you open certain files or run certain programs. UAC’s purpose is to make most programs run as a regular user (non-administrator) to limit damage that a given program could do if it was malicious. If a program needs administrative permissions, then UAC can ask for permission to run the program as an administrator. That’s what all the chatty dialogs are caused by. Unfortunately, UAC is the root of most Windows Vista compatibility issues, as far as applications go. As I explained last week, the effectiveness of UAC’s security relies on the user’s ability to discern whether to allow or cancel an action. Disabling UAC can theoretically make your PC less secure, but again, the security it provides is truly dependent on the user. I personally find UAC to be very annoying, and have disabled it. I didn’t quite expect that disabling UAC would fix compatibility problems, but it worked like a charm! To disable UAC, follow these instructions. Click the Start button and then click Control Panel. Once the Control Panel comes up, click on the green User Accounts heading. Click on the User Accounts heading again (it does something different this time). You should now see the title ‘Make changes to your user account’ at the top of the white area. Click on Turn User Account Control on or off.
Tip #5: Disable Specific Windows Services
There are several Windows services that come with Windows Vista that will thrash your hard disk, and unless you make use of what they provide quite frequently, I recommend you disable them. In order to do so, click the Start button, go to All Applications>Accessories and click Run. When the Run dialog comes up, type services.msc and click OK. A quick warning before you disable some services: Windows may behave strangely if you disable certain services. So be careful disabling services I don’t say are safe to disable. To disable a service, you can simply right click on it in the list, click Properties, hit Stop (if the button is available), and then change the service from Automatic/Manual to Disabled in the drop-down list.
There are quite a few services in Windows Vista that can be disabled:
- ReadyBoost
If you don’t have a removable flash media card or thumbdrive in your machine all the time, then you should disable this. You won’t get any of the advantages it could provide.
- Remote Registry
Allows administrators to remotely edit your machine’s registry. This one is set to ‘Manual’ by default, but it is a potential security risk, so it’s best to disable this one.
- Superfetch
If you’ve followed my instructions in Tip #2 above, you’ve turned Superfetch off, but that doesn’t stop the Windows service from running. Disable it.
- Tablet PC Input Service
If you don’t have a tablet PC, this is a useless service to have running, but on a clean install, it’s enabled by default regardless of whether or not a touchscreen is installed.
- Volume Shadow Copy
This service is similar to System Restore, in that it backs up files like mad. If you change a file, the old version isn’t overwritten, it’s copied to another hidden location in case you need it sometime in the future. This is a really expensive service to run, and it is another source of disk thrashing. I highly recommend disabling it.
- Windows Search
Disabling this service does not make it impossible to use Windows Search. This service is merely the renamed version of the Indexing Service from Windows XP. This service will constantly scan your hard drive for files to index (catalog) to help searches finish quickly. But if you don’t search often, don’t you think you could live with a 45 second long search rather than dealing with constant disk activity with this indexing service enabled? I recommend it be disabled unless you are really bad at organization and have to search your hard drive daily.
After you finish with these tips and restart, you may realize that Windows Vista has some hope yet! There are some more drastic measures you can take to make Vista use less disk space and behave faster. I’m reserving next week’s post for the more drastic measures.
I will continue this article in part three next week.
As before, I would appreciate any feedback you can offer. Email me directly at steven@uplinklabs.net and let me know what’s on your mind!
<- Part I || Part III ->
Before I begin, I would like to point out a 
There’s a great utility called 
We have to face facts, people. Microsoft has deprecated Windows XP in favour of Windows Vista. I’ve been having difficulty coming to terms with this, largely because of what I see as major flaws in Vista. To make things worse, Windows XP will no longer be supported two years after the release date of Vista. In theory, anyway. I suspect that Microsoft will have to extend Windows XP’s life cycle because of the slow corporate adoption rate of Windows Vista, but as of this writing, it looks like XP will be unsupported by 
