10 steps to improve your Vista installation

Finally, I switched to Vista, I decided to give it a try. I never used Vista before, but I heard (a lot) of complaints from co-workers who had all sorts of problems with Vista, mostly performance troubles.

I did some research on the internet and tweaked my Vista install in a pretty simple way and greatly enhanced performance and the overall annoyance level of Vista, even without disabling the Aero theme.. While disabling Aero will boost your overall performance (like disabling fade effects and transparency and stuff) thats not the goal here. I assume you have a system which runs the basic Vista install just fine. The problem occurs when you are using Vista a lot and sometimes Vista just becomes increasingly slower over time or just hangs every now and then for small periods of time. The suddenly decrease of performance and hangs are all traced back to a couple of Vista 'features' which run at moments you need all the performance you can get. At worst, while you are trying to do you work, Vista will be defragmentating your hard drive, while it is indexing it, scanning it for virusses and installing updates. If you don't want that, here is a list of things you can do or disable to prevent this.

1. UAC (User Account Control).
First things first, _THE_ most annoying part of Vista is the UAC. In Vista with every simple action you'd like to perform you seem to need to click on some 'are you sure' button. While this can be very helpful for inexperienced computer users it certainly is not for us programmer geeks, it is simple absurd. There are a lot of blogs out there about how to disable it, but by disabling it you might run into some troubles (like with Windows Update), some programs simply require UAC to be turned on or they might decide your computer is not save enough to perform certain operations. The better, but more advanced option, is to auto-accept the 'are you sure' boxes. Here is an explanation how to accomplish this:

Click Start and Control Panel. Switch to Classic View (if you haven't already) and click on the Administration Tools icon. In the list that opens click on Local Security Policy, and in the next window, Local Policies (a tiny bit redundant, but all UIs can't be perfect -- If UAC is running you'll get a UAC pop-up somewhere in here). In the Local Policies list click Security Options, and scroll down to "User Account Control: Behavior" (the full title of the policy is "User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode" but the window barely opens that far). Double-click the title and in the dialog box change its setting from "Prompt for Consent" to "Elevate without prompting." Click OK and the urge to tear your hair and scream at your PC will be greatly diminished in the future.

Update: After reboot Vista will show an error icon at the bottom left, when you double click it you will go to the security center. Security Center will say you have disabled the UAC. To get rid of the annoying tray icon simple go to Control Panel -> Security -> Security Center -> Change the way security center alerts me and choose 'Don't notify me and don't display the icon'.

2. The indexing service
Alright, it is time to disable some performance-slurping Vista features, starting with the indexing service. I usually don't use windows search anyway, i know where to find my stuff. Also when searching IN files I tend to use other products. Disable it by Going to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Indexing Options. Click Modify and click on Show all locations, notice you don't have the annoying 'are you sure' popup anymore!. Deselect all the locations that are currently being indexed.

3. Disk Defragmentation
Offcourse, defragmentation of your disks is a must. In XP you had to click the defragment button yourself to do it. In Vista they decided to do it automatically, which is a good thing. The only problem is when the process is scheduled; every Wednesday at 2pm, which is in working hours. And you don't want Windows to start defragmentating your drives when you are trying to build your code and run your unit-tests right? Go to Controler Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Defragment your hard drive (under Administrative Tools). Modify the schedule and schedule it weekends or disable it and manually run the process every now and then.

4. Windows Defender
Vista comes with extra security and extra security comes with a price. The extra security is needed and welcome by the majority, ordinary Windows users. However the more experienced users won't need this extra level of security. Windows Defender is a spyware detection program which adds an extra level of security, however what most people don't know is it runs a computer scan, searching for infected (malware) files, every day at 2PM, again when we are compiling code and running our j-unit tests. You can disable the daily scanning (or re-schedule it) at Control Panel -> Security -> Windows Defender -> Tools -> Options -> Automatic scanning. You can also disable the Windows Defender entirely (option at the bottom) when you don't want Defender to scan every file you open, or you have another spyware/virus scanner/firewall program running.

5. Power plan
This one is really easy, but sometimes overseen by the most expert of users. Vista comes with Power plans, which are really good to save battery power. Default on my laptop it was set to 'HP Optimized', which means it won't go full performance to save battery but it can adjust dynamically. Well this won't make sense when your power cable is plugged in, but Vista won't change it automatically to 'High Performance' mode. Manually set it to 'High Performance' to get, well .. a higher performance.

6. Physical Address Extension (PAE)
If you have a system with 4GB's of memory or more then you will see Vista only using and displaying 3GB's in the system dialog. This is only limited in 32bits operating systems, so this is not an issue if you have 64bit Vista installed.
There is something called Physical Address Extension (PAE) which makes it possible to crank up Vista to use the full 4GB or more, you can read about it here: http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread180206.html. If you don't interest in reading it and just want to enable it, type: "BCDEdit /set pae ForceEnable" in an elevated command prompt (which means a command prompt opened with the 'Run as Administrator' option).

7. Side Bar
Vista comes with a widget holding side bar, this was actually the first thing I disabled when I started my machine. Maybe its just a personal question of style or something, but I don't see the added value of it. Right click on the Sidebar and choose Properties -> Uncheck the 'Start sidebar when Windows starts' checkbox. Then right-click the sidebar icon and exit the sidebar.

8. Windows Auto Update
Windows Auto Update is a feature you don't want to disable at all, you need the updates. However, again, Vista installs the updates at moments you probably do not want it to. The best way is to automatically download the updates, but let Vista ask you whether or when you want to install it. Go to Control Panel -> Security -> Security Center -> Automatic Updating -> Change Settings -> Let me choose -> select 'Download updates but let me choose whether to install them'.

9. Automatic Restore Points
Restore points are a neat feature, if you are afraid some virus that corrupts your Vista machine, it will make it possible to go back to a certain point in time and restore your Vista configuration back to that point. However it is not a full backup of you machine, if a virus hits your machine, multiple files are probably infected and Restore only helps to a certain point. Vista automatically creates restore points now and then, which again costs performance (and disk space) to create them. It is better to just fully backup your machine every now and then. When something goes wrong just restore the full backup or reinstall your machine. In that case, or when you are just not afraid to get any viruses, disable the Automatic Restore Points. Go to Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> System -> System protection -> uncheck all checkboxes.

10. HP Security Tools
Last thing is not really a Vista thing, but more an issue that comes with HP machines/laptops, is the HP Security Tools. While some people absolutely love this feature and this is not performance related, it just annoyed the crap out of me. The Single sign on feature is clever, but doesn't work with the browser of my choice (which isn't IE). I don't like the annoying popups asking me to save passwords and when i disable it I can't remove the icon from the icon bar. It even still popups every now and then warning me. So I just totally uninstalled the software.

Although the above points greatly improves your Vista experience, it also makes your computer less save, so don't forget to install your virus scanner software!