Tips 7 Vista/XP
MINIMIZE MENU LOADING DELAY TIME THROUGH A REGISTRY HACK
By default,both XP and Vista wait 400 milliseconds before presenting expansion menus [those menu items with right-facing triangles on them]. You can eliminate the wait completely for instantaneous menu expansion [though be warned, you may not actually like it]. Note that this will not make, say, you’re your primary File or Edit menu show up faster-those menus automatically load as fast as possible.
DO IT Run regedit at the Run prompt. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Desktop. Double click the MenuShowDelay key in the right-hand pane and set the value to 0.
DISABLING QOS AND IPV6 OPTIONS WILL IMPROVE BANDWIDTH AND WEB PERFORMANCE
The theory goes that you should disable any service you aren’t using, and that turning off IPv6 and QoS Packet Scheduling options in your NIC properties will boost browsing speed. One absurb legend holds that QoS alone actually “reserves” 20 percent of your bandwidth. Microsoft has formally debunked this tip, and our test back that up: We found zero difference at all in file-transfer speeds whether QoS and IPv6 options were on or off, on both XP and Vista systems.
DON’T DO IT
PUTTING YOUR PAGGING FILE ON A SECOND HARD DRIVE WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
Splitting up the pagefile and your everyday apps is common sense. Doing this allows Windows to dump temp junk onto one drive while not having to interrupt reads or writes on the other. If you have two hard drives, this is a tip that definitely works and works well: Expect at least a 5 to 10 percent speed boost, depending on the existing speed of your rig and, especially, the performance of your drives. But any second drive will help at least a little: While not recommended, you can even put the pagefile on an external USB drive and see some performance gains.
CLEANING OUT CACHED AND TEMP FILES IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, ESPECIALLY OF YOUR WEB BROWSER
Unless you have so much junk on your hard drive that you are nearly out of free space, deleting any number of files-whether they’re temp files or permanent ones-won’t improve performance at all. The only exceptions to the rule are for programs or processes that involves every file on your drive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for examples, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It make sense to clear this files out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’t get a performance boost for your trouble.
DON’T DO IT
Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista
