Community Newsletter: Q&A: What can I do to improve the speed of my Vista machine?

(NT) I'm with you all the way on that one

Vista vs XP

I hear what you're saying, but, i feel it's a shame you have to "Disable" a few things, or run your computer like you say; to a "Bare Minimum" to run your Vista. I'm not blaming you for what your feel you need to do, i throw all the blame to Microsoft, it should not have to be this way. I myself, just got tired Navigating, Challenging, and Tweaking my computer to run Vista smoothedly,that is why i said "Goodbye" to Vista and "Hello" (again) to XP.

Vista runs FASTER with Aero Glass interface

Actually, using Aero Glass may make Vista faster, not slower. Yes, it's counterintuitive, but with Aero on, the shell 3D functions are offloaded from the CPU to the GPU. That gives you more CPU cycles for other things. With a good 3D video card and discrete graphics RAM, Vidta actually runs faster with Aero Glass turned on.

.....G

vista when using shared memory

Now that is a fun issue. If you want to play a really graphic game, in my case the sims, have fun with that! I mostly use my laptop so unless I want to buy another one with a great graphics card for around 2 million dollars you really have to mess with the services. That part of vista is kinda a downer. Maybe someday someone will come up with a vider card for laptops that plug into a usb port. Now that would make my life complete!!

Bon

New OS machines vs speed

In reply to: What can I do to improve the speed of my Vista machine? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

When my wife got the XP on a new Dell machine I thought things would be great. I continued to use my 98SE and we both upgraded to broadband. It has been a year now and my 98SE is almost twice as fast as her XP, even thought she has a newer machine. At first they were pretty near neck and neck but evidently over time her machine began to slow down and now when we need a quick answer to something we use the 98 machine and can usually have the answer before the XP can boot up. I sometimes suspect something is going on on the XP that is not necessary or perhaps not "authorized". Perhaps the Vista is similiar. I am convinced the 98SE will serve the purposes of 75% of home computer owners more efficiently than the new machines. We just need a source for support since MS doesn't support 98 home users anymore. P.S. I used to have problems with 98SE until I quit using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. The difference was amazing.

speed it up by adding RAM

okay, i use vista too, i did find it quite slow, so i upgraded my RAM, works fine now, but upgrading ram isnt always easy to do, but if you have a USB Memory Stick/USB Drive, vista asks you at the autoplay screen what u want to do with it,just click on speed up my system. its uses the USB Drive as more RAM.

Easy.

No way

I've disinfected my fair share of W98 machines. You actually can surf the Web in Vista without getting pummelled by drive-by downloads; you can't do that with W98. Vista has a locked kernel, just like most other OSes (Linux, BSD, OS-X, etc.). W98 does not.

If you just sit and type gigabytes of random lines of code (spaghetti code), you don't get an OS. It takes a lot more than you might think just to get it to boot (knowing shell, for one). Vista is buggy, but so is every other OS when it first comes out. Vista's biggest problem is actually weight, not instability.