Mobile Software and Devices

Archive for July 19th, 2010

 Improving Vista performance is still a hot topic  , because it is known to  chew up resources. Luckily, you can still get some excellent performance out of it, even on  average hardware, so don’t worry about all the reports of Vista slowness, we can speed it up quite a bit.

If you are finding Vista really slow, then we recommend you start tuning the performance by running a few tweaks at a time and see if you notice any improvement. If  your system is still slow, then you can start turning off features such as Aero. But make sure to check out your hardware specs as you really shouldn’t try running Vista below their recommended  hardware.

OK, here are some quick Vista tweaks that should get performance  chugging along.  To start with, turn off services that hog a lot of resources and aren’t  that cool anyway.

 Stopping Resource Intensive Services

1) Turn off Remote Differential Compression (RDC)

Remote Differential Compression (RDC) allows applications to synchronize data between two computers in an efficient manner. The synchronization efficiency is made possible by using compression techniques to minimize the amount of data sent across the network.

To switch it off:

- Control Panel -> Programs and Features
- On the left menu click on “Turn Windows features on and off”
- Uncheck Remote Differential Compression

2)  Stopping Windows Search Indexing

In order to make searching faster, Windows Vista keeps an up-to-date index of files and folders. This index is updated on a regular basis and can slow your computer considerably. If you don’t do a lot of searching, it is worth turning this off.

- Click Start -> Computer
- Right click on c:
- Select the “General” tab -> uncheck Index this drive for faster searching

3) Turn off hibernation

Hibernation is a  nice feature, but its another one that uses too many resources and should be switched off if not used  often.  It is advised that you try disabling it to see what kind of performance gains  occur.

- Control Panel -> Power Options
- Click Change Plan Settings
- Click Change Advanced Power Settings
- Go to Sleep -> Hibernate After
- Move the selector to 0
- Click Apply

Hopefully those tweaks will help speed up Windows Vista. The effects will vary depending on hardware. We also recommend the use of a Registry cleaner such as RegCure. If you are about to upgrade, then Windows 7 is a good option, but Vista does work well once tweaked.