Speed Vista: Tweak your programs

Well, you’ve gotten the operating system down to a certain point, what’s next? Well, figure out where your bottlenecks still are! There’s probably some software on your computer that just kills performance (or 6-7 of them). Don’t blame MS quite yet. Anyway, luckily for you Windows Vista has a simple tool included that can help you identify the problem and remedy it quickly.

* Open the task manager (many ways to get to it, easiest is ctrl+alt+delete then select Start Task Manager)
* Navigate to the Performance tab
* Click on Resource Monitor
* Expand the disk section and sort by either reads or writes column.

Additionally, you can check out cpu, memory usage and network usage in the same way. Now you will probably notice that your virus scanner is using 20x the resources of Aero, as it insists on scanning your RAM all the time, and scanning every damn file you read from, write to, or execute. But, what can you do? Try to find a couple programs that are too greedy, or running when they have no reason to be running (Example: itunes has a couple services installed that run constantly. Why? I’ve no idea why it takes 2-3 services running and several threads to just be looking out for when you just might plug in your ipod, because that functionality is already built into windows). Office also has a preloader ‘quick start’ service (as does open office) to make sure that things run ‘better’ for you. Even though you do have super fetch which should do it automatically without the need for any extra memory usage.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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