All of Windows Vista’s drives use the newer NTFS partition system rather than the old FAT32 system, but what you might not know is that Vista still supports the ancient (DOS, early windows) 8.3 file-name convention.

If you still run old DOS programs then you need to keep this feature active, but if you don’t you should disable this feature and speed up your file access.

To disable your 8.3 file-name convention just follow this;

  • Open regedit
  • Navigate to this location
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
  • Find this key
    • NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
  • Change the value from 0 to 1
  • OK
Disable 8.3 File-Name Convention