This guide will hopefully help you get more from your system. This guide is intended to help you get more from it.
I suggest you install and do everything else before running the guide.
I've tested all the things mentioned below on my machine. I run Vista Beta 2 on an AMD 64 3200+ with 1GB of ram. Firstly we'll address some of the more 'annoying' things in Vista.
When the Welcome Center appears, untick the box at the bottom saying show this at boot.
Click Start, then click on your User Picture at the top. Once you've entered the User Accounts Manager you'll see a link that says "Change Security Settings". When you press that you'll be taken to a new screen.
Untick the box that says "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer".
What this does is disables that feature that means you'll need to provide permission when you run certain things, like regedit, taskmanager, msconfig e.t.c
After clicking ok you may need to Restart. If so, do that.
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The Sidebar is beautiful i admit, but it asks a lot of your system. To stop it appearing when you login to Windows just go to the Control Panel, Appearance and Personalization and click the Windows Sidebar link.
When the Window appears, you'll see a box that says "Start Sidebar when Windows starts". This is your choice but personally, i disabled it.
The Recycle Bin isn't so much a resource user but it does have a certain amount of space allocated. Right click it and then properties. Set the custom size allocated for it to 2000mb.
Now you want to press the Winkey + R on the keyboard and type control folders in the Run box. Click the view tab and untick the following boxes before applying.
Automatically search for network printers
Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color
Use Sharing Wizard.
Then right click "computer" on the startmenu and select properties. Once the System window appears, click the link that says "Advanced System Settings" on the left shortcut menu.
Under the System Protection tab disable System Restore on any drives its running on.
Under the Advanced tab, click settings underneath the Performance heading.
Untick all the boxes there apart from the last six.
Apply all changes made and then close open windows (or minimize so you can see the desktop). Right click the desktop, click personalize.
Click Screensaver, then change it to "none" before clicking "Power Management" and changing your plan to balanced and setting the plan settings so that the Monitor and Hard drives never go off.
Back at the main Personalization menu, click "Change Desktop Icons" under tasks (on left handside) and add whatever icons you want or remove whatever icons you want from the desktop.
Right-Click Internet Explorer (or open it, click tools at the top and Internet Options). Go to the content tab, click settings under the Autocomplete heading and then untick all the boxes. Under RSS Feeds settings also tick the box "turn off feed reading view". Apply your changes and exit.
You may also want to turn off the Phishing Filter, that is your choice. I have.
Now press Winkey + R on your keyboard, type msconfig and under the startup tab untick Windows Defender. This will stop it running on boot, we will also be disabling the service in a moment. Apply the changes but DO NOT restart now. When you next boot up a window will appear saying you've done some things, just tick don't show this window again and that'll stop.
Once again, do Winkey + R but type Services.msc instead. Stop and disable the following...
Some may already be disabled and/or disable others. You may need to do them in a different order, some may even crash Services.msc and you'll need to re-do it but it DOES WORK IN THE END and gives you that performance.
* Background Intelligence Transfer Service
* Fax
* Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service
* Parental Controls
* Network Location Awareness
* Problem Reports and Solutions Control Panel Support
* Protected Storage
* Remote Registry
* Routing and Remote Access
* Secondary Logon
* Security Center (though it may still be a pain sometimes)
* Windows Connect Now
* Windows Defender
* Windows Error Reporting Service
* Windows Search
* Windows Update
Reboot.
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This worked for me, i got a nice machine running Vista now and i kept most of the stuff that makes it worth using. You may get messages asking you "do you want to enable this" e.t.c just get rid of them windows and you'll live happily ever after
You may find your Network Connection doesn't appear to be working in the notification area but is actually working, its because one of the services disabled makes this feature work. i suggest you install and do everything else before running the guide.
Edited by Neon, 28 May 2006 - 07:14 PM.