My friend's Windows Vista computer is slow. I have gone through some general steps to get the thing running fast. Let's now go over some last ditch specifics to speed things up.The theme is that you should disable anything that might take up extra CPU resources, and thus slow things down. Turn off any fancy visual effects. Turn off disk performance monitoring. Disable user account control (UAC).
Clear out your Internet Explorer browsing history. There might be tons of stuff in your web browser cache. And if you are using Firefox as your default browser, install FasterFox to help it run better.
Turn off any Windows services you don't need. This one is a little tricky. You don't want to make Windows crash. However every service may be configurable to run at startup. If you can identify some that you definitely don't need, disable them.
Finally you can fine tune your page file. This is a big file on your disk that acts as virtual memory. Make this file be on your fastest disk if you have many physical hard drives. Set the size to a fixed large size. Normally Windows can manage this for you. However if you have a lot of free disk space, make it big and constant size.
If you follow all my advice from the last couple posts, I bet you can get some old hardware running Windows Vista lightning fast. Good luck.
