Two performance tweaks to boost your Vista performance

I have a HP dv6000 laptop with Vista Home Premium. Since day 1, my machine was terribly slow for no reason. I tried so many tweaks that didn't seem to work at all. I installed Process Explorer from sysinternals tools to monitor which process is taking much resources. There were two things that gave me a good performance boost:
  1. Disable Windows defender.
  2. Disable the windows indexing service.
I have my own anti-virus software (Avira) which provides protection against much better protection than the Windows defender. But because both the defender and Avira were scanning each file and process, it effectively doubled amount of load to protect the system. So I disabled the defender. You can read how to turn off the defender here.

I don't need the indexing service offered by Windows. The indexer hogs so much resource and I have not used the search feature much. You can easily disable indexing by right clicking on the drive in Windows Explorer and un-checking the indexing for that drive. Make sure that change is applied on the drive and all the files and directories under that drive. You can read more about this here.



Another worthy exercise is to launch msconfig and inspect all the programs that are started during start up. You can read more about how to do this here.

If you still experience slow down, launch the Process Explorer and inspect which process is taking more CPU. You can press space bar and pause screen refresh and inspect all the processes that are running.

Comments

Linda said…
Nice and clear review. But I think beginners still need the basics to fully grasp what's going on here.

Helen Neely
2/11/2010 12:15:00 PM
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