Speeding up Vista with only 1GB?

[TheGreatSatan]

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]

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]

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

[silverdemon]

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]

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]

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]

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

[SgtM]

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]

"Readyboost"

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

[crenn]

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