Microsoft Gives Tips to Improving Vista Performance

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Recently I visited Microsoft's site looking for updates, and bumped into a help article for Windows Vista users (well it can be apply to basically any Windows version aswell) to help improve system performance and speed things up.

The bottom line is "Was this helpful?"

Well, to tell you the truth , its nothing new, and now with the release of Service Pack 1 for Vista, you may want to see if it does anything to improve performance first.

The tips Microsoft is recommending are:
Most of these are common sense and apply to many operating systems not just Windows. The issue I'm having here is when they say "Run fewer programs at the same time" . Thats insane. With todays hardware and with enough system memory you should be able to multitask with the basics.

If Windows sluggish and is not allowing you to surf, edit a doc and listen to music at the same time then you definitely have a problem. These are basics you should be able to do. I can see why Microsoft is reiterating once more the basics to users. I think we all know by now that sure you can have the latest and greatest hardware, but if you arent doing the OS housekeeping once in a while you can count on Windows eating up drive space and memory unnecessarily.

From my experience with Windows in general, some of these tips hold true, but the most important ones I know work are:

- Defragmenting your Hard Drive(s)
- Deleting Temporary / Cached files
- Remove from startup unnecessary utilities and programs (such as updaters, itunes, quicktime, adobe, and so on...) which you can run yourself anytime you want.
- Increase your system page file and system memory (usually at least double what you get by default).
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