Speeding up Vista with only 1GB? [Archive]

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TheGreatSatan

01-07-2008, 05:52 PM

What's the most I can do to speed up a laptop with only 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista Premium?

I told this guy to buy another gig and I'll install it, but in the meantime I disabled everything in the boot tab in msconfig and uninstalled all the trial software. I also got rid of Norton and Office 2007 trial and replaced in with Office 2003 and AVG. I got rid of the 5 Google programs and the stupid sidebar too. What else can be done to speed up this beast?

Luke122

01-07-2008, 07:41 PM

Turn off all the visual crap.. it'll look like win2k, but it'll make a pretty decent difference in performance.

Set a static swap file size also, instead of the system managed one. Umm... turn off the UAC too..?

Greco101

01-07-2008, 08:17 PM

see if anyone is will to trade his vista copy for an xp pro? lol

silverdemon

01-07-2008, 08:28 PM

tell the guy to be very patient! I have a laptop running vista with only 512MB ram... It runs, but it is not a speed-demon. Anyways, I think luke said about everything you can do until he gets his extra gig of memory. until then he'll just have to have patience ;)

crenn

01-08-2008, 11:27 AM

Download a trial of PerfectDisk 8 and run it. The Offline defrag and then the smart placement does wonders in terms of loading times.

Luke122

01-08-2008, 11:40 AM

I was running vista business on 768mb ram..boot up time was awful, and office 2003 was a dog, but other than that it was perfectly usable.

Drum Thumper

01-08-2008, 11:51 PM

Got a USB port? If you do, get one of those new USB sticks that double as addable RAM.

SgtM

01-10-2008, 09:41 AM

Got a USB port? If you do, get one of those new USB sticks that double as addable RAM.

I'm interested to know how well this works. The way I figure it, the USB interface itself is a total bottleneck, and makes the whole thing worthless. I'm pretty sure there's a thread on it somewhere around here.

Luke122

01-10-2008, 12:30 PM

"Readyboost" (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/readyboost.mspx)

Doesnt work like ram, it's more like extra cache.

crenn

01-10-2008, 08:57 PM

ReadyBoost can improve the performance in terms of less mechanical lag. It does help to an extent, but there are still issues with it.

TheGreatSatan

01-13-2008, 02:19 AM

It obviously won't do anything for boot up.

crenn

01-13-2008, 07:53 AM

It does when you log in. But before that, no, it doesn't.

haha49

01-22-2008, 02:44 AM

ok goto properties turn off transparent bar in the frist menu then turn the silder bar off big diffrence