Aprox

As some of you know, I just got my copy of Vista Business in the mail from Microsoft. I have had a lot of fun playing with it, but like most things I love to tinker and get under the hood so to speak. I was curious if you guys that have been using Vista for a while now know of any "essential" or all around good tweaks/optimizations for Vista?

I have done some googling, but a lot of the stuff is for beta versions and I'm just not sure if they are applicable to the final version. My biggest goal right now is to find out what services I can disable, it seems like a TON of stuff loads on boot and it uses up a fairly large chunk of RAM. Anyways, thanks for the info guys!

ming

um... give Bootvis a go... tell me if it still works.. lol

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perris

bootvis never worked, it just did what the operating system did on it;'s own over time and at times caused some issues

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NetRyder

We have 2 GB of RAM, Aprox. I wouldn't worry about the RAM usage.

Vista is designed to make better use of your RAM which would otherwise be idle and wasted. Superfetch, for example, now includes a profiling tool that keeps track of what applications you launch and when you launch them (even between reboots), and preloads data into memory based on your usage patterns. This is one of the reasons why you'll notice apps loading faster as you use the system more. When applications really need the RAM, Vista automatically flushes out prefetched data to make room for them. I regularly run multiple virtual machines simultaneously within Virtual PC on my box, and they run without a hiccup.

Unless you're seeing performance problems, I wouldn't bother with any tweaks. You might just end up making things worse. I've been running Vista Ultimate RTM for almost 3 months, and it feels smoother than XP x64 ever did.

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Aprox

Wow, I didn't know that. Thats pretty slick, I guess I'm used to XP when your usage is high its very unlikely that it will go back down.

So if I were to fire up a game, it would reconize that and reduce the amount of ram being used by non essential things such as the aero interface and such?

NetRyder

When you launch a game, the DWM gets turned off and the desktop switches to the basic UI. When you quit the game and return to the desktop, the DWM is re-enabled and you switch back to Aero.

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LordOfLA

Yeah its pretty neat

I've been playing the vanguard soh beta recently and it uses 1.5GB of ram and runs smooth as ice

Superfetch is pretty cool too as I can run frequently used apps while vista spins down the hard disks.

Readyboost helps out a bit though not as much as it would if I had less than 2gb of ram obviously.

I think the best thing you can do is get your self a 1gb or 2gb readyboost capable flash drive

Also don't install onecare live... cause my machine to lock up numerous times.

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kcnychief

I have OneCare Live installed and it runs just fine.

Do have a silly situation where Vista is only seeing 3.2GB of my 4GB of RAM though

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NetRyder

32-bit Vista, I'm guessing?
I explained why this happens in another thread just yesterday. See: http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php...847#post775847

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kcnychief

Yeah, I figured that was the case since that was the same way it was in XP. Bah well, thanks for confirmation

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