We just posted some great tips on how you can speed up Windows Vista yesterday, but lets look even further at some more optimization techniques for Vista.

Unfortunately most users have not been too satisfied with the performance of Vista, and we have certainly seen some lacklustre performance even on high quality hardware. It seems kind of a shame to have to turn off all the new features in Vista just to be able to use it without some serious slowness.

Anyway, these tips are straight from Microsoft, so hopefully they will help you out in getting more from Vista. We ran these on our test machine and the performance was pretty good. The estimated gain was around 15-20%.

Windows Vista Optimization Tips

  • Limit startup programs. Edit the startup config and don’t run anything you don’t need. This one can be a big timesaver
  • Delete software/programs you never use. This one is pretty obvious, but most users don’t do this. So do it now.
  • Defragment your hard drive. This helps speed up drive access and program access.
  • Clean up your hard disk. Another pretty obvious one, just make sure you do it.
  • Run less programs at the same time. In the age of multi-tasking this one can limit productivity, but try it if your performance is poor.
  • Turn off visuals. We have discussed this before – turn off Aero and other fancy stuff.
  • Add more RAM. Another one discussed previously. Try it after you have tried all of the other tweaks.
  • Disable unnecessary services. Just turn off any service that you don’t need. You would be surprised by how many silly services are running in the background hogging your valuable resources.
  • Check for spyware and adware. Spyware, adware or malware can seriously affect performance. Run a spyware scan now.
  • Install updates. Install Windows updates and driver updates for your software and hardware.

You can find the full source of the article here. We hope this helps you get some extra performance out of Windows Vista.