I’ve done a few posts on how to speed up Vista etc but I havn’t gone into detail on how to make your desktop run faster and not freeze/stick/stop/blah blah.

Remember when you do these tweaks that the overall speed of your PC will depend on numerous things so sometimes these tweaks may not perform as good you hoped, that would mean there could another more damaging problem with your PC.

Sidebar

I know people out there love the new sidebar full of the gadgets, but did you know the sidebar can slowdown your interface. Remove it by;

  • Right click your sidebar
  • Select properties
  • Uncheck Start Sidebar When Windows Starts

Visual Effects

I’m not even going to go into detail here, visual effects can slow down your PC;

  • Open control panel
  • Click system and maintenance
  • Click performance information and tools
  • Click adjust visual effects
  • Now you will see a big list of all the visual effects running, uncheck the ones you don’t need

Transparency

The transparency effect can look really ‘cool’ but it also slows things down;

  • Right click your desktop
  • Click personalize
  • Click windows color and appearance
  • Uncheck enable transparency

Aero Theme

I guarantee for the first few week you use Vista you will run the Aero theme but after a while you may find it just becomes slow and you need to change it back to the basic theme;

  • Open personalize again
  • Open windows color and appearance
  • Select Windows Vista Basic
  • Click apply