Windows Vista Lounge

No this is not some crazy tweak where you point compressed air, upside down, at your CPU or RAM chips to get better performance–although the latter is a great hack for cracking passwords…but I digress! Back to the point, speed up vista! Yes I like it and sometimes feel like it might never get to be the OS that XP turned out to be (stable, reliable, well established, blah blah). Microsoft is releasing  SP1, (cheer) and lowering prices to boost acceptance, and of course all new PC’s come with it in one flavor or another. Meanwhile there seems to be one inherent issue, it simply gets pokey when opening apps or doing anything resource intensive.

I tried something just to see if it would help, and it did (more than I expected it would). I turned off the Aero effects and simply chose the Vista theme instead. I like the menu’s better actually, those giant buttons were a bit much for me. Anyway, it made a notable difference for very little effort!

If you’re new to Vista and want to make the change or try other settings, here is a quick “How-to”

1. Right mouse click on your background

2. Select [Personalize]

3.  Select [Windows Color and Appearance]

4. Chose [Windows Vista Basic]

5. Click OK.

It may go into that windows trance where it everything goes black and white for a few secs. But afterwards it will flip back to normal, the menus will tighten up and overall things will be a bit more perky.

If this isn’t enough for your performance needs, please just go add as much RAM as you can afford and you will be fine

Anyone else got a tweak or tune up idea? Please post!

Finally, the service pack we all waited for, the one that would fix everything we struggled with in Vista! But wait, there is a catch!…This is not a full blown service pack. It’s an “RC” meaning release candidate and that is where things get interesting.

For those of us who went through the RC Versions of Vista in the beta program, we remember how this played out. Download it, install and go through all the tribulations but when the actual version is released, you have to UNINSTALL the RC service pack first! It may not be a big deal but then again, it could mean a lot of repeat work for you if you make config changes after the RC is on your machine.

As much as I like to be on the edge of the latest software, I recommend serious caution before slapping the RC Candidate on your Vista OS. Or at least wait until a few trial stories come out to see if your system or favorite software has a potential issue.

Now if only I could get that Office 2007 SP1 to stop reinstalling itself everytime I open Outlook…sigh.