One thing that I was a bit disappointed with was the amount
of time that Vista requires to boot up. Yes, windows xp
has been around for a long time and it has been "bugged
out" and improved a lot. With Vista it will take some
time to improve it's features. I have searched for solutions
on how to speed up the boot process and make it start faster.
There is no a lot of available options at this moment. I
have tried bootvis.msi from Microsoft which worked great
on Windows XP and previous versions. Unfortunately this
software will only install on your system but you will not
be able to make it run on Windows Vista.
Another solution I found was Windows ReadyBoost which is
recommended by Microsoft. The way it works is that it can
use storage space on some removable media devices, such
as USB flash drives (etc.) to speed up your computer. How
do you make it work? Vista instructed me to simply insert
my device and AutoPlay dialog would offer me the option
to speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost. I found
this to be not true and did not see anything offering me
to speed up my computer. (See picture below)
Beware that some of these devices use both
slow and fast flash memory, and Vista can only use fast
flash memory to speed up your computer. Vista recommends
that you use one to three times the amount of random access
memory (RAM) installed in your computer. This means that
if you have 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM and you plug in a
4 gigabyte (GB) USB flash drive, setting aside from 512MB
to 1.5GB of that drive will offer the best performance boost.
Another cool feature that I found in Vista
is a System Health Report. Go to Control Panel,
Performance and Information Tools, Advanced Tools. Click
on Generate a system health report (see below).
Let it run (takes about 60 seconds), this
report will show you a lot of details about your computer
and suggestions on where your weakneses might be. Report
includes hardware configaurations and errors, software configuration
and errors, information about your cpu, network, memory,
disk and much more.
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