Setting up Windows Vista

As I’ve blogged about before, a lot of Windows and Macintosh users who have never tried Linux before, have this opinion that it is hard to install. I’m a firm believer that to simply install the OS, and get a working set of hardware drivers (on most common hardware), and a workable set of applications is far easier and simpler on Linux than on Windows. With most modern Linux distributions, all of your common tools and applications needed for day-to-day operation of your computer are already installed for you, and ready to go.

When setting up a Windows machine (regardless of version), not only will you need to be sure to have all of your hardware drivers handy (I recommend going on-line and making sure you have the latest versions rather than trusting the CD’s that came with your hardware), but you will need all of you application CD’s and will probably download a few freeware and open source applications from the web as well.

Honestly, I firmly believe that someone must actually be a little more computer savvy in order to properly set up a Windows system than a Linux system. The problems with Linux come into play with unusual hardware, and hardware that isn’t supported by open source drivers but that becomes another topic altogether!

In the coming posts I will highlight some of the applications I install to consider my installation “complete” as well as share a couple of web-sites that can assist you in getting your Windows Vista based computer “tweaked for speed”.

First, to start us off, here are two web-sites you should bookmark right now:

http://www.tweakhound.com

http://www.blackviper.com

If you want to tweak your Vista system read through some of the information on those two sites, paying special attention to the articles (especially on BlackViper) regarding Windows Services. While I’m not going to make any specific recommendations on Vista tweaks, I will say that there is good information on both sites, and as always, some tweaks are good, and some are bad. Go through the services on BlackViper.com and read the descriptions on those he lists as can be disabled and/or set to manual and decide for yourself if you feel like you would lose functionality you desire. I will not tell you what services I have enabled and/or disabled on my machine, but I will tell you that I have 37 services set to Automatic and 4 are set to Automatic (Delayed-Start). Go ahead and count how many are set to Automatic on a out-of-box Vista install and you can see what an impact tweaking your services can have on boot speed as well as RAM usage. As always, use your best judgment when applying any tweak! Always tweak a clean install, and never tweak when your data could be at risk!

Now, to quote Forrest Gump: “That’s all I’ve gotta say about that.”

Check back tomorrow for information on some of the applications I install and use, also coming up, I am planning a post reviewing the newly released VMware Workstation 6.5 bundled with a review of Raxco PerfectDisk for VMware Hosts.