Making Vista Slimmer
I just installed Vista on my HP tc4400 Tablet PC and I’m going to use this entry to keep track of performance tweaks.
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Turn off most of the visual effects. Right-click on Computer and Choose Advanced Properties, then click on Performance Setting.
- Choose Adjust for Best Performance. Hit Apply. Things will get ugly.
- Using the checkboxes turn on what really matters to you. The most important one to turn on, assuming you don’t want ugly, is Use visual styles… — it’s at the bottom. I turned on Smooth edges of screen fonts, too.
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Disable Services. Type services in the Start Search box to bring up the control panel.
- Certificate Propogation: Used with Smart Cards, which most people don’t use. Mine was set to manual, but it was started. I disabled it. There are two other services related to Smart Cards, but mine were set to Manual and not running, so I left them alone.
- Offline Files: A nice service, if you use it. I don’t mirror my network files on my tablet, so I disabled it.
- If you have a USB flash drive, use ReadyBoost. Vista will set up a disk cache on a USB-attached drive. You use as much of us as you want, leaving the rest for files. I used a 512MB drive that was gathering dust. I devoted 444MB, leaving a little space for files. To turn it on, right-click on the drive icon under Computer and chose properties off the menu. When the properties sheet pops up, look for the ReadyBoost tab.
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Remove items from the Run list. Start Regedit. Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\. What you can remove varies a lot, depending on what you’ve installed. You need to look up what each program does. I was able to remove:
Windows\CurrentVersion\Run- Quick Time
- Tunes Helper.
- Replace the bloated Adobe Reader with FoxIt or a similar PDF reader.
