One of the better Windows Vista features I’ve seen is ReadyBoost. Despite contrary misinformation you will read on other sites, this does not add more memory to your system. The flash memory used is nowhere as fast as RAM, but it is sometimes faster than hard drives. Readyboost works by caching your pagefile on the drive. It does not replace the pagefile, it is just a cache. A faster than hard drive but slower than RAM cache. But this speed can make a difference, especially consider the slowness of many peoples hard drives.

How do I use it?: (more…)

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In Windows Vista the networking components were designed to be much more intelligent and automatically adjust the network settings to optimize the connection speed. This is a great new feature. Your network components basically tweak themselves for optimal performance. In most situations, these components automatically adjust perfectly for best performance. However, with wireless WAN cards the detection of network conditions is flawed and can result in slower network performance.

To fix this problem, Microsoft has released a hotfix for users affected by this issue. If you have a Wireless WAN device, I suggest you give this hotfix a try. (more…)

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As with XP, in Vista you can speed up performance by sacrificing the visual effects. Go to the Control Panel, System and Maintenance, System Properties, Advanced (Tab) and settings. Set the radio button in ‘Adjust for best performance’.

This may produce a marginal improvement on a low spec machine, but it I could not detect a faster response on a machine with a 1.2 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM. In truth, I was under-whelmed by this Adjust for best performance. A better way to truly speed up your Vista machine is to buy a 1GB USB RAM stick and use Vista’s ReadyBoost feature. (more…)

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