Windows Vista is a rather heavy operating system with many neat features, but unfortunately they all come at a price. Right out of the box it requires a pretty hefty system to run (arguably). Before you run out and buy a new computer just so you can run your base operating system, check out these 10 Simple Ways To Speedup Windows Vista tips to lighten the load. This is just the first in the series, so many of them may be very apparent to those experienced in tweaking. If you’re still using Windows XP, then check out 10 Simple Ways To Speedup Windows XP.

This article details the following 10 tips: (more…)

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If you use Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) as your Linux distribution, which everyone knows it’s a pretty fast Linux operating system, you can also do some tricks in order to get a boost. I will teach you today some quick hacks on how to improve the overall performance of your system.

WARNING: Please follow the instructions below very carefully, in the order in which they are listed below and reboot your machine after each one. If not, your operating system will NOT work anymore. (more…)

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Well, this one is arguable. Many sites preach service tweaking as the end all of tweaks, and Vista does have a lot of services (like 130). However, a good portion of them are set to manual or disabled by default. Manual will only start the service when the operating system thinks it needs to use that program. However, Vista does have a lot of services set to Automatic by default that are not needed for many people. Granted, they are usually sleeping, not using any CPU, and if they use memory, they usually get paged out to disk pretty fast. But, regardless, it is fairly quick to do, and will gain you some improvement.

First off, how to tell what you should really be worried about. One new feature in Vista is the ‘Go to Service’ feature in Task Manager (or at least I never noticed it before). Open Task Manager, Processes tab, right click on a particularly heavy process, and select ‘Go to Service (s)’. This will jump you over to the services tab, and select all the services that are running under that process (multiple ones are usually running under svchost.exe, many of the others only map to one service). (more…)

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Windows Vista has around 130 services. True, not all of them are running, but most are set to default to run when necessary. Over half of them start up on a default machine. Your first step towards tweaking vista should be to disable services that you frankly have no need for. They are just running aimlessly.

There are two options here. You can manually go through all 129 services with the aid of our In-depth guide to help you determine if you might need a service (dependencies and what depends on a given service are listed), or you can run one of our custom Registry files which will allow you to try out several tweaked settings. Don’t worry, if you mess up your services, or you don’t like the results of the tweaked settings, you can always go back to the default settings with one of the handy default reg files on the same page. (more…)

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When tweaking Vista, at some point you will probably run in to a situation where you need to modify, move or even delete a system file. In Vista, system files are protected by the TrustedInstaller service and Windows File Protection by default. Below, I will show you how you can take ownership of system files and grant yourself the necessary permissions so that you can get your task done.

Warning: Modifying, moving or deleting system files on Vista can have adverse effects on your operating system and in some cases render the system inoperable. Be sure that you know what you are doing prior to proceeding with these instructions. (more…)

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Web-mail users and bloggers know too well the folly of inputting text into a browser window. It’s very easy to close out a session while composing a message, lose everything, and be left scrambling to retype the e-mail or post. Firefox offers a fix. By tweaking the agile browser’s settings, previous sessions are easily restored, complete with form entries.

From an open Firefox window:

* Click Tools
* Scroll down to Options
* Select the Main tab
* At the top, where it reads “When Firefox starts:”, select “Show my windows and tabs from the last time” from the drop-down menu (more…)

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