For those of you out there like me who have both XP and Vista, and already know how to tweak your XP for maximum performance and aesthetic value, but are as clueless as can be on how to do the same in Vista, I found some extremely good tweaks for those people out there and I'll be listing them below, some of these I gathered from various websites and consolidated them into this thread for easier use of navigation rather than looking over tons of googled queries and such, I hope this helps some of you the way it's helped me.

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Tip 1: Customize the size of desktop and file icons.

For some time, it has been possible to adjust font size in office documents and Web browsers simply by holding down the CTRL key while rolling your mouse wheel up and down. In Vista, the same action lets you tweak the size of your desktop icons. Just click on an empty area of the desktop, hold down CTRL, and spin your mouse wheel until the icons are the size you want. You can also adjust the size of your file or folder icons in Windows Explorer by doing the same thing. This is extremely handy for viewing thumbnails of images.

Tip 2: Increase SATA drive performance.

This tip “enhances” drive performance by allowing the drive in question to perform more write caching to system memory. The danger is if your system loses power and you do not have a backup power source (UPS), whatever data is cached to system memory will be lost. If you’re the adventurous type and want a bit more responsiveness out of your system, click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, click the Device Manager, open up the Disk drives tree, right-click a drive, and select Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check “Enable Advanced Performance.” Click OK.


Tip 3: More widescreen Vista wallpapers.

When Microsoft went shopping for panoramic, widescreen wallpapers for Vista, it tapped Hamad Darwish to shoot some photos. Some of his photos made it into the initial shipping version of Vista, but many did not. Now Darwish is offering all of them for download, absolutely free. Some of them are absolutely remarkable, in our opinion, so go ahead and check them out.

Tip 4: Speed up Flip3D.

This tip will be useful for notebook owners or anyone whose PC is packing less than stellar graphics processing power. The Flip3D animation can bog down weaker graphics cards if it has to flip a lot of windows, so this is a tweak that lets you set the number of windows that will be rendered in 3D at one time.

• Click on the Start Button, type regedit in the Search bar, and press Enter.

• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, and DWM.

• Create a new DWORD and call it Max3DWindows.

• Set the value of this to something between four and nine (“4” and “9”) depending on the performance of your card (a higher number requires more video card power). You should then feel free to experiment to find the best value for your computer. Restart your PC to finalize the change.


Tip 5: Two must-have Sidebar Gadgets.

At first blush, we thought the Windows Sidebar was rather useless. The default Gadgets were not useful (who wants an analog clock when you have a clock on the Taskbar?), and it seemed like a poor rip-off of Yahoo Widgets. However, we’ve now come across some rather useful Gadgets at the Microsoft website.

The first is Multi-Meter, which is the first Gadget we’ve ever seen that can measure CPU activity for multiple cores. You can download it here.

Another Gadget we’re quite fond of is DriveInfo, as it displays the free space on multiple volumes. Since we have several hard drives on our home machines, we love this Gadget. It also allows you to access the drives by simply double-clicking them in the Gadget. Download it here.


Tip 6: Discover what applications are linked to certain processes.

The Processes tab of the Windows XP Task Manager was a confusing, barren wasteland of cryptically-named processes. If you wanted to find out which application was responsible for a certain process, all you could do was to copy down the name of the executable, and then search for it in Windows to locate it or Google it. This was an annoying process. Thankfully, Microsoft has fixed this in Vista by adding an “open file location” option when you right-click any process. Doing so opens the folder the process is running from, which can help you figure out if a certain process can be turned off or not.

You can also click “View” at the top of the Task Manager and click Select Columns to select which columns to display.

Tip 7: Use ReadyBoost.

There’s been a lot of talk about Vista’s ability to use Flash drives to “boost” system performance. Traditionally, Windows will cache files both to system memory and to your hard drive. The cached files on your hard drive reside in the Page File, which is also known as “virtual memory.” The problem with this approach is that even the fastest hard drives are sluggish when compared to flash drives, at least when it comes to seek times, which are nearly instantaneous on solid-state memory. Readyboost tries to address this situation by allowing Vista to use the Flash drive for its Page File, rather than the slow hard drive. It’s important to note that the actual Page File is still cached on the hard drive, but is being accessed from the Flash drive - which means that you're not at risk for losing your data.

So, how do you enable it? Simply insert a “Readyboost capable” Flash drive that is 1GB or larger in capacity into one of your system’s USB ports, and when the pop-up box appears asking what you want to do, scroll down to find the option, “Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost.” You can then specify how much space to make available on the device.

This is a hotly-contested feature in Vista as some users claim a decent performance gain (mostly people with less than 1GB of RAM), but others say the benefit is negligible. If you’ve got a spare USB drive laying around, why not give it a shot? We didn't notice a profound difference in performance, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won't.


Tip 8: Partition drives in Vista.

Back in the XP days, if one wanted to partition a drive from within the OS, he had to purchase expensive, third-party software to do so. Not anymore. Vista includes built-in drive partitioning which is – we can’t believe we’re saying this – totally awesome. The reason it’s so awesome is that you can partition drives on the fly, from within Windows. For example, if you have a 400GB hard drive with 200GB of free space, you can shrink the original 400GB partition down to whatever size you want, and then create a new partition out of the new unpartitioned space. Here’s how you do it.

Right-click My Computer, select Manage, and click on Disk Management. You will see all of your volumes listed. Right-click whatever volume you want to shrink, and click “Shrink Volume.” (You can also extend volumes as well.) Type in the size of the partition, then click Shrink. After a few seconds, the partition will be shrunk, and you’ll now have a whole lot of unallocated space. Right-click it and select “New Simple Volume.” We fooled around with this utility, both shrinking and expanding volumes that had data on them and we experienced no data loss or problems whatsoever.


Tip 9: Stretch your wallpaper across two displays.

We love our dual displays, but we don’t like staring at two instances of the same image all day. Thankfully, Vista lets us stretch our wallpaper across both displays quite easily. This was also possible in XP, but it was not an intuitive process. Keep in mind, however, that stretching an image across two displays obviously requires a picture that is large enough to stretch all the way across both displays, so you’ll need to add up the resolution of both displays and find an image that is of those dimensions.

Right-click the desktop, select Personalize, and then Desktop Background. Select your image, and then select the middle option for “tile” to stretch it across both displays.


Tip 10: Turn off unneeded Windows features.

This one is self-explanatory. Do you need Tablet PC components installed? Probably not, unless you are using a Tablet PC. So turn off whatever you don’t need in the name of keeping your Windows install as lean as possible.

Click Start, Control Panel, then under Programs at the bottom click “Uninstall a Program.” In the left-hand pane you’ll see “Turn Windows Features on or off.” Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. Uncheck whatever you don’t need.


Tip 11: Enable Aero mouse pointers.

This is odd. Microsoft made new Aero-based mouse pointers for Vista, but the default mouse pointer is the old 3D white scheme. To enable the new mouse pointers and animations, right-click the desktop, select Personalize, then Mouse Pointers. Click on the drop-down box under the word Scheme, and select Windows Aero (system scheme). Click OK.


Tip 12: Make XP computers show up in your network map.

Vista uses a new protocol named Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) to display a network “map” of all computers in a network, but the protocol is only in Vista, so XP computers do not show up in this map.

Microsoft has generously released the software for XP, and it must be installed on an XP machine for it to show up in the Vista map. Click here to download the software for Windows XP SP2.
The following are mainly speed tweaks while the aforementioned were tweaks ot make things not only better but also more ease of use.

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10 Speed Tweaks that can make a huge difference in Vista performance

1. Turn off Windows Search Indexing
Windows Vista search indexing is constantly reviewing files on your system to make their contents available for quick searching. This is handy, but can severely impact system performance.

To disable constant indexing:

* Click Start then Computer
* Right Click the C: Drive
* On General Tab, Uncheck Index this drive for faster searching
* On the subsequent dialog box, Select Include subfolders and files

2. Turn off Remote Differential Compression
Remote Differential Compression measures the changes in files over a network to transfer them with minimal bandwidth rather than transferring an entire file that has previously been moved. By constantly checking for file changes, this service can hinder system performance.

To disable this service:

* Open Control Panel
* Switch to Classic View
* Select Program Features
* Choose Turn Windows features on and off
* Scroll down and uncheck Remote Differential Compression

3. Turn off Automatic Windows Defender Operation
Windows Defender real-time protection against malware continues to run despite having Automatic operation disabled.

To disable this feature:

* Open Control Panel
* Select Windows Defender
* Choose Tools from the top menu
* Select Options
* Uncheck Auto Start at the bottom of the window

4. Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation
Windows Vista and its always-on defragment feature isn’t really that necessary and can cause system slow down. Just remember to run a defrag manually every week or so.

To disable this:

* Click Start then Computer
* Right Click the C: Drive
* Click on Properties
* Select the Tools Tab
* Click on Defragment Now
* Uncheck Run on a schedule

5. Add a 2GB or higher USB Flash drive to take advantage of Windows Ready Boost (Additional Memory Cache)
Ready Boost is Microsoft’s name for using a USB thumb/flash drive to provide some quick access memory the operating system can use as extra RAM. The Ready Boost system can significantly improve system performance.

To set this up:

* Insert a USB Flash Drive
* Click Start then Computer
* Right Click the USB Drive in My Computer
* Select the Ready Boost Tab
* Choose Use this device
* Select as much space as you can free up for RAM usage vs. Storage

6. Turn off Windows Hibernation
Windows hibernation background services can use a large amount of system resources. If you don’t use the Hibernate feature on a regular basis you may want to disable it to give Vista a performance boost.

To disable Hibernation:

* Select the Control Panel then Power Options
* Click Change Plan Settings
* Click on Change Advanced Power Settings
* Expand the Sleep selection
* Expand the Hibernate After selection
* Crank the selector down to zero
* Click Apply

7. Turn off System Restore
Analysis and restore point creation by Windows Vista can eat a fair amount of system resources. Disabling this service will obviously mean the system restore feature in Vista will not be available in the event of a system crash. Change this at your own risk.

To disable this service:

* Control Panel>System
* Click System Protection on the left panel
* Uncheck the main system drive
* Agree to the confirmation

8. Disable User Access Control (UAC)
This much-loathed new Vista feature attempts to protect your system from malware infection by making you manually confirm a whole host of everyday user operations. While it doesn’t directly impact performance, it can be annoying and might be more hassle than good.

To disable User Access Control:

* Click Start then Control Panel
* Select User Accounts
* Select Turn User Account Control on or off
* Uncheck User Account Control Box
* Restart as recommended

9. Disable excess Windows Services that Auto-Launch at Startup
Just like Windows XP, Vista ships with all kinds of services enabled that load at startup and may never be used by most users.

To see what loads at startup and disable the ones you likely won’t be needing (they can always be started manually later):

* Click Start then Control Panel
* Select Administrative Tools
* Choose System Configuration
* Click the Services Tab
* You can safely deselect:
o Offline Files (unless you’re using Offline File Sync)
o Tablet PC Input Service (unless you have a tablet PC)
o Terminal Services
o Windows Search (If you have already disabled indexing)
o Fax (unless you’re using a fax modem)

10. Disable Excess Windows Features
Windows ships with other features that are listed separately in the Vista operating system from the startup services.

You can view and disable these features by:

* Clicking Start then Control Panel
* Select Program Features
* On the left panel, select Turn Windows Features on or off
* You can safely deselect:
o Indexing Service
o Remote Differential Compression
o Tablet PC Optional Components
o Windows DFS Replication Service
o Windows Fax & Scan (unless you use a modem for faxing)
o Windows Meeting Space (unless you use the Live Meeting Service)


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