I’m not gonna lie. I do not like running Vista at work. But right now I’m stuck with it. As I’m struggling to run a MOSS VPC, IE, and One Note at the same time I find myself grasping for more resources.
I think the biggest failing of Vista’s resource utilization is the flashy interface. You can turn off ALL of the superfluous features by following these steps:
- Go into the Control Panel and open up "Performance Information and Tools"
- On the left side, click on the "Adjust Visual Effects" link.
- When the Performance Options widow appears, you have options for changing which visual effects are used in the Visual Effects tab. To remove all frills and get the most out of you PC, select the radial for "Adjust for best performance". This will drastically change the way things look in Vista. I was satisfied by choosing "Custom" and unchecking everything except "Show thumbnails instead of icons" and "Use visual styles on windows and buttons."
So far, this has helped out a lot and seems to save me an average of about 100 to 200 MB of RAM depending on what’s going on at the time.