Vista speedup

Vista seems to run sluggish sometimes. Luckily there is a cure!

First things first: get more RAM if you can. 2 Gigabytes is not overkill at all.

Get a very fast usb drive and use it for ReadyBoost . Go to Properties > ReadyBoost > Use this device.

Next we look at the Boot time. Vista does a stunningly good job at diagnosing every degradation there. Go to Event Viewer > Create Custom View... > XML > Edit query manually. Now enter the text below. Then save it in your Custom Views as "Boottime Degradation". This is a shortlist of potential issues that updates itself.

<QueryList>
  <Query Id="0" 
    Path="Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational">
   <Select Path="Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational">
     Event[System[Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance'] 
     and ((EventID &gt;= 100 and EventID &lt;= 199))] 
     and EventData[Data[@Name='DegradationTime'] &gt; 10000 
     or Data[@Name='TotalTime'] &gt; 30000 ]]
   </Select>
  </Query>
</QueryList>

Now we look at something more obvious. If you work on a laptop you’ll notice Vista has a good battery life. It achieves this by slowing down your cpu. It forgets to speed it up again once the laptop is plugged in. Go to Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options and select the "High performance" power plan.

Last but not least, Vista likes to keep the harddrive as safe as possible, but speed is all we need. For each local disk go to Properties > Hardware > Properties > Change settings > (if UAC is on : continue) > Policies. There you select both Enable write caching on the disk and Enable advanced performance.

3 Responses to “Vista speedup”

  1. Brook says:

    I run Vista on a Vostro laptop by dell. The laptop is all beefed up and everything but I noticed that it ran slower when unplugged. I couldnt figure out why untill I read your post. Thank you.

  2. Tadas says:

    Thanks for these tips. I bought usb drive, my boot time changed drastically!

  3. […] previous post about vista speedup has been quite popular. But it doesn’t mention defragmenting your harddrive. This is such an […]