Windows Vista Lounge

While I am positive about the overall Vista improvements made over XP (and in some ways missing the proven success XP had) I’ve noticed a marked difference in performance by turning off the automatic updates. By that I mean compeltely off, not just set to download later or whatever variant of the settings you choose. Here is why I prefer this. If I’m nto having probalems with Vista, do I really want to update something behind the scenes? Vista is till proving itself so any new update could throw off my efforts to tune it the way prefer it to run.

Now, you might be thinking, only an idiot doesn’t run updates. This is where I recommend you periodically go out and check for updates manually. There are some you might want and some (especially office 2007 ones) that you truly do not! By making this change, which I compared between a Vista workstation at my office and one at home, I saw a big improvement in bootup, and overal performance. Here is why….those frickin updates can really drag your system in the ground while they scan to see if they are needed, then they download uber big files, then run! All while you are simply trying to check mail or worse, do something intense in Photoshop or other resource needy programs.

Aside from this tweak I also recommend, regardless of your Windows OS, to delete the files in your temp directory and defrag once a week. This one effort can have enormous benefit.

I know there is nothing ground breaking in this idea but if you find yourself creeping along in Vista, try setting things as described here and you will see a difference!