Preventing Vista hangs/restarts

I like Vista except that things hang and restarts are required way more frequently than I ever had with XP. I'd like to spend a couple of weeks trying to fix Vista before deciding to downgrade to XP64. Can anyone recommend some specific tweaks that may help with this? I just turned off search indexing & superfetch. I'm googling Vista optimization right now...

thanks!

Arp

 

I try and turn off most of the stuff that comes up on the start up.

 

Yes, that's definitely part of it. I'm getting rid of anything extraneous running in the tray as well.

 

one hang i experienced with vista is with the sd card in the slot. is this one you had?

 

weird timing...I experienced multiple windows explorer.exe crashes last night...I was trying to map to my desktop system on my X200 so copy some files and everytime I opened the window to my network locations / opened my mapped drive letter, explorer.exe crashed.

 

Don't use google for vista optimizations. There are some really bad or really old suggestions on there that could do more damage than good. Use This NBR thread for safe vista tweaks.

 

My X200 use to hang/freeze all the time (about 5 times in a day) and required restarts. I have eliminated this issue ever since I upgraded my Intel Turbo Memory driver from Intel's website.

http://d o w n l o a d center.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2813

(remove spaces in "download" in the above link).

Hope this helps. Good luck !

 

@receph: I don't (I think) have a card reader. I do have some hanging on boot with a scheduled disk check on the 2nd hd (ultrabay) that I'm trying to resolve.

@Stealth: The suggestions I followed (Tweakhound) seemed ok, and then I followed a few of NBR's tips this morning. Then - and I'm not sure which set this is related to - explorer.exe started sucking up 90%+ cpu on both cores. So I'm in the midst of a System Restore (back to pre-tweak) and it's. taking. for. ever. Like waaaay too long. I never experienced this stuff with XP. (btw, our T400 config is close - I have the T9400 and 7200rpm x2 and the 9 cell)

@urxtream: I don't think the problem I have is as bad, but I will check my drivers when the current system restore ... finally ... finishes.

I have to say - right now, for the first time in years of Windows usage (dating back to 98Lite), I'm feeling that the OS frankly could be a lot better. Sure, I've had years of XP usage & tweaking, but the thing should be easier by now. And Windows 7 looks like it's going to be a slight upgrade to Vista. Apple was smart to start over with OS X. Years ago, I picked Windows because I wanted to build my own box and be an inveterate tinkerer, but I'd rather spend time with my kids than reinstall an OS these days