(Approx. 927 words)

Improving Vista Performance
Written by Vinny La Bash, a member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group Inc., FL.
www.spcug.org
vlabash (at) comcast.net 

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

Microsoft has added security features in Vista which didn’t exist in XP. There are new functions and while the graphics are really neat, they can give your system a big performance hit if you don’t have enough memory. Thanks to up-to-the-minute technology, and great manufacturing improvements, RAM is cheap. There is no good excuse for not loading up with as much memory as possible. 

Vista is the most RAM hungry modern operating system in existence. One gig is about the lowest amount of memory you can have without feeling that you’re slogging through a lake of molasses. Two gigs should give you acceptable response time, and four gigs will put wings on your PC with some afterburner boost thrown in. Don’t be a cheapskate. It’s false economy to starve your system of RAM. 

If you are already loaded with Ram, you can use Vista’s built-in ReadyBoost feature in conjunction with a flash memory card or USB key to give an added kick to system memory. You need a high performance flash card or USB drive. Insert the device and Vista will politely ask you if you wish to use the device to speed up system performance. Answer yes, and then tell Vista exactly how much of the device to devote to speeding up the system. ReadyBoost will be active as long as the device is plugged into the system. 

Once you have enough memory, examine your video card. If you want to experience the full graphic capabilities that Vista offers, buy a video card that’s Vista Premium Certified. 

To see how your video card checks out, open up Control Panel, switch to Classic View, and then activate the Performance Information and Tools utility. Look at your base score. This number represents the overall graphic capability of your system. Notice that your base score is not some combination of all the subscores. Your base score is the lowest performing member of all your subscores. That doesn’t seem fair, but that’s reality. You can try updating your score, but it probably won’t change. 

If you get between 1 and 3, general operations which include word processing and spreadsheet tasks will work fine. Email and web browsing should be OK, but web sites with large amounts of embedded graphics will take a long time to load. Video applications will be problematical. 

A base score between 3 and 4 can run Aero and the majority of the new Vista features, but Vista’s more advanced capabilities may bog down your system. For example, your monitor will be satisfactory even at its highest resolution, but multiple monitors may slow down your system severely. You will be able to watch most TV shows, but a high definition broadcast could be a slow motion disaster. 

A base score higher than 4 should handle anything that Vista throws at it, including HDTV and 3D gaming. If what you want or need from Vista requires a higher base score than your system can provide, you need to replace one or more of your components. Use the subscores to determine what stays or goes. A low score may require you to either turn off the Aero interface or upgrade your video card. 

Go back to the Control Panel. From the Classic View activate the System icon and then select Advanced system settings. When the System Properties dialog box comes up, click the Settings button in the Performance section. You’re about to make some tough choices.

If you can’t make decisions, you can Let Windows choose the best settings for my computer and be done with it. Adjust for best performance disables all the great visual effects that make Vista a terrific graphical interface. Adjust for best appearance makes your system look spiffy, but you’ll take a hit on speed. 

Choosing Custom allows you to make some reasonable compromises while keeping full control of your PC. Some features like sliding menus are pure eye candy and do nothing useful. Turning them off gives performance improvement with no loss of function. 

There are options in the Advanced tab where you can control how the CPU processes work. What’s more important to you, adjusting for visible performance or making sure that the housekeeping services Vista performs are performed efficiently? Make your choice and monitor your system. You can always change it back later. 

Unless you know what you are doing, leave the Virtual memory section alone. Virtual memory is a portion of a disk drive that’s configured to masquerade as memory. Because it’s part of a disk and not physical memory, it can’t work as fast as real memory. When the system runs out of physical RAM it can use a disk drive to keep going instead of stopping dead in its tracks. 

You can change the location of the file to a different disk, resize it, or do both. Each choice has consequences of its own. Making the wrong choice won’t destroy your system, but it could noticeably slow down performance. The default choice is to let Vista manage the file. That’s the best choice for most people. 

There are many other things that you can do to get the best possible performance from Vista such as modifying the Index Options, but that’s a subject for another article.