Fix Windows Vista Errors

I have had a few emails regarding ReadyBoost, mainly from people trying to test out the feature but are unable to do so due to an error trying to set it up.

Basically this is an easy fix - get a new data stick!

Readyboost requires at least 256MB of available storage space on your data stick to work, and if you don’t it will not work. So get yourself a larger data stick and try out ReadyBoost, it is a good feature.

Note: Home editions of Windows Vista do not allow remote desktop.

If you never use the remote desktop feature (or if you use another product) then you may want to disable it as it is just another wasted resource on you PC.

To disable your remote desktop follow this;

• Open up you system box, either by;
  • Control panel > system and maintenance > system
  • Right click you computer icon in your start menu and click properties
  • In you start search box type system, it will be listed just as system
• In the left column click remote settings

Now under the section called remote desktop simply uncheck ‘Don’t allow connections to this computer’, this will disable the remote desktop to your PC.

Here is a great tweak that I used to use on XP but completely forgot about when I upgraded to Vista, it reduces the shutdown speed using WaitToKillServiceTimeout.

This setting in the registry allows you to specify a length of time that the service control manager must wait for services to complete the shut-down request before shutting down.

So if a value of 20,000 is set then your PC waits 20 seconds for your services to finish before shutting down. This is great to speed up shutdown just don’t go to crazy and try to make it too fast first go - and backup your registry.

• Open regedit
• Navigate to this location
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
• Find this string - WaitToKillServiceTimeout
• Right click and select modify
• Now as I said earlier don’t put down 1000 first time, try using 10,000
• Reboot and test it

You may want to try and reduce the value of WaitToKillServiceTimeout, but just do it by a 1000 at a time.

There are so many types of tweaks you can perform on your computer that will speed it up, and some are more unknown than others.

Here are a few of these type of tweaks, they don’t involve RAM or drivers but every small tweak you make can improve the overall performance of your PC.

Remove Unwanted Fonts

Believe it or not, the more fonts you have installed the slower your computer will perform. It may not be a drastic slowness but everything help, so you should go through and delete any unwanted fonts.

Note: Windows uses many fonts for menu bars etc. so don’t go deleting all your fonts, just ones you know are useless.

• Open control panel
• Click appearance and personalization
• Open fonts
• Find the fonts you want to delete, right click and delete
• Done

Disable System Sounds

I didn’t believe this at first, but turning off your system sounds can make a slight improvement of your PC’s performance.

• Open control panel
• Click hardware and sound
• Open sound
• Select the sounds tab
• Under sound scheme in the drop down select no sounds
• Apply and OK

You should all now know about the cool new Vista power options feature where you can use very low power to sleep your PC and wake up ready to go at a moments notice. But what we are hearing from many of our users is that quite often they will come back to their computer to find it on, burning electricity.

There are a few things that may be causing Vista to wake up out of a nap, hopefully these tweaks should let your Vista PC sleep well and not burn up energy.

A Device is Waking Your PC Up?

Your PC may be getting woken up by a device that is set to wake up your PC. To check what devices are waking up your computer and how to fix the problem just read the following;

• Open cmd (run as administrator)
• Type this at the command prompt;
  • powercfg –devicequery wake_armed
• This will show you a list of devices that will wake up your PC

You can disable a device from waking up your PC by doing this;

• Open device manager
• Find your suspect device
• Right click and press properties
• Click the power management tab
• Uncheck ‘allow this device to wake the computer’
• Click OK

Stop Your Network Card From Waking Up Your PC

Just like your devices your network card can also wake your Vista machine up, you can disable this feature by doing this;

• Go to device manager
• Expand network adapters
• Right click on your network card and click properties
• Make sure ‘allow this device to wake the computer’ is unchecked
• Click OK

Edit Multimedia Power Options

You may want to perform this tweak so your multimedia features won’t wake up your PC;

• Type power options in your start bar
• Click change plan settings on your power plan
• Click change advanced power settings
• Scroll down and expand multimedia settings
• Expand when sharing media
• Choose allow the computer to sleep (you can decide if you want this on battery, plugged in or both)
• Done

If you have ever tried to download large amounts of data on a USB stick you will have noticed just how long it takes, well this is a tweak that will improve the speeds that you can download things onto your USB drive.

Warning: If you take your USB stick out of your PC a lot you may lose data if you perform this tweak.

• Click start
• Right click on computer and select manage
• Select device manager
• Expand disk drives and select your USB drive
• Right click and select properties
• Select the policies tab
• Select optimize for performance
• Select OK
• Done

Do you want more features on your Vista? Does your version of Vista not come with what you need? Then you will need to upgrade to a better version.

Vista makes it very easy and fast to upgrade to a better version of Vista and can be done without searching the web. You can do this through your control panel (you need to be online);

• Open your control panel
• Click system and maintenance
• Click Windows anytime upgrade
• You will be now sent to a Microsoft webpage
• Here you can purchase an upgrade and then upgrade your PC

There are a few different options for you to upgrade, these include;

• Home Premium to Ultimate
• Business to Ultimate
• Home Basic to Home Premium
• Home Basic to Ultimate

Read through the options about the different upgrades and work out the one suitable for yourself.

Fix Windows Vista Errors - Free Download

One of the things I personally find very annoying and apparently so do our users is the tapping that happens on notebook touchpads. On these touchpads, you can imitate a mouse click by tapping the pad with your finger. However, the problem with this is that quite often when just trying to move the mouse pointer a tap is initiated. This is annoying when using the internet because you can accidentally click links.

I have many times clicked logout links by accident or some other link and lost work online due to this. So anyway, lets look at how you can disable the tapping feature on notebooks with Vista.

To turn off tapping:

• Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Mouse
• Click the Device Settings tab -> Tapping
• Uncheck the checkbox “Enable Tapping”
• Note: this may look slightly different depending on your touchpad

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Speed Up Vista by 300% - Free Download

Do you need to resize your Windows Vista partition size? Here is a quick tip for you so that you can extend or shrink the partition size of a drive, just do the following;

• Click start
• Right click on computer
• Click manage
• Select disk management
• Right click on the drive you want to change
• Select extend or shrink
• Enter the size you want to change it
• Click shrink or extend
• Done

Memory problems on your PC just like many other problems can create errors on your computer and will lead to the loss of memory or even shutdown. Vista has a tool you can use that will check for any memory issues and inform you of them, to run the Windows memory diagnostic tool just do this;

• Click start
• Type memory in the search box
• You now have 2 options to run the scan
  • Restart your PC immediately and run the scan
  • Run the scan the next time you start your PC
• Done