Clear Out Your System Tray

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Vista's new ReadyBoost system allows you to basically add RAM to your PC by taking advantage of any flash drives that are plugged into it. The folks at ExtremeTech have come up with several other ways to speed up your Vista OS by disabling programs that you don't use. A lot of the methods are complicated and might cause more harm than good—especially if you don't use a good system (like a backup brain) to remember what you've done thus far.

But one tip in particular stands out for being easy, useful, and applicable to anyone running any version Windows: clear out your system tray. That is, click on the arrow at the bottom of the screen next to your clock to expand the tray, and then right click and quit any programs that you're not currently using. For me, that generally includes several programs that launch (sometimes obnoxiously) on startup, like Google Desktop, Skype, AIM, eFax, and Quicktime. To completely turn off the latter (and a few more tricky programs), there's another easy fix. Go to the start tab and type "msconfig" in the run box. Once the system configuration box pops up, go to the startup tab and uncheck the box next to Quicktime. That will stop it from running in the background and sucking up your precious computing power.