8 things to do to speed up Vista
OK, I’ve been going on a bit about Vista lately, I guess because I’ve been working on more Vista machines than usual. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before (and am too lazy to go back and look) but I’ve discovered a phenomenon that I think is quite interesting. People come to me with broken computers so they are seldom thrilled with their situation, but people with Windows XP tend to be frustrated with their computer, people who have Vista are universally disgusted with Vista. I’m not sure what to make of the distinction but it’s another reason I wouldn’t like to be the Vista Product Manager in Redmond.
Putting on my helpful hat, I found a short article on speeding up Vista which includes a reference to Microsoft’s suggestions. I think both are worth a look for anyone having slow Vista issues. Having looked at this quite a bit myself, I’m sorry to tell the reader that there is just no silver bullet for speeding up Vista, sorry. Wait, that’s not entirely true. Here is my list of things to do if your Vista is slow:
- Install more RAM
- Install more RAM
- Install more RAM
- Upgrade to a faster Hard Drive
- Uninstall all the garbage programs the manufacturer of your PC put on your computer (HP is particularly bad about this)
- Reduce the printer overhead. HP and Lexmark are supposed to be printer companies but they fancy themselves as software companies. Both load tons of services and drivers on your PC. Personally, I don’t use their products because of this. If you do, try and load the minimum configuration that their install software will permit. If you are like one of my customers with one Lexmark and one HP printer and all the requisite drivers for both, you’re doomed.
- Ease up on the security programs. These massive “security suites” are often worse than the problems they supposedly prevent (Norton and McAfee are completely out of hand, the rest are catching up). Get a good (free) antivirus (I recommend Avira AntiVir) and perhaps an on-demand spyware program like Spybot S&D (don’t install Teatimer), turn on the Windows firewall and you’re safe from 99% of the threats you can be safe from.
- Install more RAM
Here’s the good news, RAM is really cheap right now and it’s not that hard to upgrade yourself (don’t let anyone charge you more than $100 parts & labour to do the job and if you do it yourself it will be a lot cheaper). Most of the consumer laptops and desktops I’m seeing are fitted with 1GB of RAM, that’s not enough for a good Vista experience. Get your machine up to 2GB total RAM and you should be laughing.
In my experience, disk defragmenting, disabling services and uninstalling programs (unless they are specifically causing problems) has only a psychological effect rather than a meaningful quantitative one (something like the Hawthorne Effect). It probably won’t hurt to try though.
When I tried to log on to family computer, a box saying “there are not sufficient resources to load” my account with the default something-or-other came up. The message had a timer that was going to close the message, and then when it closed it would not log me on. I couldn’t turn it off normally so I cut the power. When I turned it back on I logged on fine?
I read here Worcester PC but couldnt make sense?
There are a number of things that could cause this problem, it’s a little hard to say which one from your description. If another user was logged into the machine they might have had a program running that would cause you to get the error. If you were just turning on the computer, perhaps the antivirus or some other start-up program encountered a problem. IF it only happened once, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.