Vista Tweaks

I read through the Sticky in the OS forum, and there are a ton of tweaks...

I oeverall am tremendously happy with my Sfx and the speed of everything, but I was looking to get maybe a little consensious from other FX users, as to which tweaks were the most noticible, efficient and worth while if any?

So Far I have just turned off system restore.....

Any Opinions?

 

You should definitely defrag your boot files and tweak your shutdown time.

 

In this thread

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

I did:

1. Disable TMM
2. Eliminate Unneeded Startup Programs
3. Cut Shut Down Time In Half!!!
6. Disable Vista Search Indexing
8. Turn Off Unused Windows Features
11. Ensure Your Video Drivers are Up To Date!!!!
12. Increase Performance by Adjusting Vista Visual Effects and Performance Properties!!!!
13. Remove that Annoying Security Center Notification!!
14. Turn Off User Account Control (UAC)
15. Turn off System Restore
16. Check out this disk defragmenter and optimizer
17. Get CCleaner!!!
21. Increase or Decrease Desktop Icon Size in just a click!!!!
23. Clean System Restore and Eliminate Shadow Copies​

I know it sounds like a lot, but it really didn't take that long to do and I actually noticed performance gains in everyday use.

 

How much of a gain does Turning off System Restore do? It is kinda nice to have it.

 

it be good if u can tell me what are the unneed startup program, cuz that startup inspecter was detecting nothing useful, other than that i dont feel like tweaking to decrease visual quality.

 

Go here first http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html and read the TGTC...it's long but worth it. Then decide for yourself what you want to tweak, don't just blindly go and turn things off, learn about them first.

 

I did the tweak guide too and like the OP, the differences are quite noticable!

That guide is a life-saver for non-Vista users like myself! That user ACL feature was freaking driving me nuts!

Frag

 

it saves you a good couple of gigs of space. unless you are retarded with comps....I don't really think you should need it.

 

i just did that and i used to have 150 free now it jumped to 171. lol

 

Thanks, I have done it both ways, just checking

 

Turning off system restore is somewhat akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face. It will give little to no increase in performance, and if you're running that low on disk space, you need to be looking elsewhere to get more space. With about 13 years PC building and repair experience, I'm not too "retarded" as to computers as indicated in another message, but a successful system restore can save a ton of work for those of us who tweak and set up our computers to work for us. If you just stick on a couple of games and internet, there's not much loss, but if you have a nicely built up system, it can eat up a couple of full days restoring it. While system restore is no substitute for a good disk image, it won't lose any recent documents like a few days old image would.

Third-party cleaners for the registry are also risky, and often the source of problems that are evasive and with the cause unknown. Windows has its disk cleanup, checkdisk, and defrag which is generally fully adequate for the task. While a registry cleanup can be 'nice', it may make no performance difference, and if it causes some seemingly-unrelated problem later, is not much of an asset, so use with caution.

Uninstalling unnecessary software, watching for programs that stick themselves in at startup unnecessarily, using a good (even free, like AVG or Avast!) antivirus, keeping spyware off via Spybot Search and destroy, Spyware Blaster, and Windows Defender are also necessary for good performance. (removing just the Norton security garbage that came with my laptop made a very noticeable difference in startup and performance). Turning off UAC in Vista will also bring a considerable improvement, but carries its risks with inexperienced users.

I see a lot of references to the more expensive machines here, and if you're going to spend that much, don't be cheap and try to fill your hard drive up by gaining a few GB with system restore shut off. With a bit of searching, you can spend $120 or so and get a larger 7200rpm drive, much faster than the OEM ones, which really WILL improve things, instead of any miniscule amount caused by system restore.

 

Very well stated, System restore is something that most users take for granted, but when you need to use it, and its disabled.. well I have been there done that, never again.