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A brief history of M$ Vista

Microsoft announced on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista as their next Operating System to follow on from WIndows XP. It hit the market in November 2006 to retail, OEM and business and in January released to the worldwide community. Additions to Vista included a new GUI, AERO (Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open) (in the Home Premium and above editions only), UAC (User Account Control) and 'flip 3D' amongst others. It was supposed to be more 'aesthetically pleasing' than the previous LUNA (moon, in the romance languages). Windows XP style was referred to as the 'Fisher-Price interface'. Yes, something out of Toytown!
Aero could be described as 'eye candy', something that is pleasing to the eye. That may be so, but you can get bored with quite quickly especially when you realise the extra CP usage when enabled. Vista was the result of the Microsoft long work upon 'Longhorn', the much talked about new Operating System. Something went wrong on the way. Vista comes in many flavours: Starter, Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. Starter and Basic had the classic theme only. Vista requires so much RAM.

The business community were suitably unimpressed, Vista did not meet their needs, upgrading from XP and the cost involved really were turned off by it. However, Vista came the norm with nearly all new systems to hit the domestice retail market although some did offer XP as an alternative (by now working quite well anyway). The problem with the early release of Vista was a lack of customer awareness and I for one fell victim to this. An offer from my local Staples outlet were offering a Fujitsu Siemens, 17" screen, 1 gig RAM and Vista Basic as the OS. OMG! I thought 1 gig! Only 499 smackeroozies! Plonker was I and duly purchased said offer. Setting up was pretty straightforward and was up and running within 30 mins. I thought the bloody thing had a reverse gear in it, slow to boot, slow to open apps and just sluggish to do anything. AT the same time I had an enquiry from a client asking for recommendations. After a bit of research I came up with a FS 15.4 screen, Vista Home Premium but only 512mb RAM. Christ, what a pain this was, the spec was pretty awful but she said go for it anyway. When AERO was enabled it just slogged. But she was happy when I put it in classic mode. But this should not have happened, the OEM was quite wrong to install HP with barely a start in the memory department! In addition, I found new OEM systems bloated with unneeded software (Toshiba, FS, Aser, Sony, Dell and the worst HP/Compaq). Over time Vista has improved greatly but generally requires quite a few tweaks to optimise for fluency/speed. The addition of bloatware in the OEM editions and their persistance to 'phone home' is irritating to say the least, so let's get rid of it. Some of the bloatware is the OEM's own software which wants to look after your new machine, the rest are useless games, Ebay  shortcuts, customer satisfaction, OEM updates and other superfluous / useless addons/shortcuts. You will find also trial versions of Office (student/Home version) and  more than likely a trial version of AntiVirus software. BOLLOCKS, YOU DON'T NEED TO ACTIVATE OR GET YOUR CREDIT CARD OUT.  Most OEM systems come wth Microsoft Works and will do what you require word processing and spreasheet wise. It is quite useless for professional use and you may find that recipients of your word processed docment ca't be read at the other end. If you want to get/go more professional without the bloody ridicluous costs then get this http://www.openoffice.org/  as an alternative to M$ Office or Works.

In essence, one could say that Vista was the most useless OS ever! I'd say yes, that is correct. Allow me briefly to curse....(effing con from Redmond really).

There are many apps out there to ensure your system is flly protected.  Windows Control Panel is effing useless when it comes to uninstallation. However, there are other apps which will uninstall unwanted junkware more fully. And the good thing is, they are free.

Ok, following on from my homepage, you will now have a browser of your own preference. What we are going to now is get uninstaller and cleanup apps that work better than the inbuilt Windows apps. Download and install the following two programs: RevoUninstaller and Ccleaner.

And there is a memory addressing problem in the 32bit version which is what we are dealing with here, in most cases; 4 gb RAM (and only 3.5gb seen or is usable)

So, how can we improve the performance of Vista in the home environment? There are memory limits for Vista as shown below (wikipedia, thanks).

PHYSICAL MEMORY LIMITS FOR WINDOWS VERSIONS

Well, don't ask Vista to be a rocket OS, but you got it. What we need to do now is look at the startup configuration 'utility'; using this might reduce the processes