Small Business

10 Ways to Turbocharge Windows Vista

By Rick Broida

Updated on: August 31, 2007 / 9:42 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

If you've purchased a new notebook or desktop PC recently, chances are extremely high that it came with Windows Vista. Chances are also pretty high that you're not thrilled with the machine's performance. That's because Vista is a slowpoke of an operating system, especially on notebooks (more on that in a minute). A blog called Saving Money offers 10 Vista tweaks that promise to make your PC run faster. For example:

Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation Windows Vista and its always-on defragment feature isn't really that necessary and can cause system slow down. Just remember to run a defrag manually every week or so. To disable this:
Click Start then Computer Right Click the C: Drive Select the Tools Tab Uncheck Run on a schedule

These are good tips, all of them easy to implement, but the author missed the most important one of all: Add more RAM. I've got three new Vista notebooks on my workbench, all of them stocked with 1GB of RAM. Because the video subsystems borrow some of that memory (a common arrangement in notebooks), all three machines run slow as molasses. I installed another gigabyte in one of them and it's noticeably peppier. Definitely a worthwhile $50-60 investment if you're saddled with a slow Vista system.