Practicing the Black Art (09/02)
Improving Vista Performance
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@comcast.net
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Microsoft has added security features in Vista which
didn’t exist in XP. There are new functions and while the graphics are
really neat, they can give your system a big performance hit if you
don’t have enough memory. Thanks to up-to-the-minute technology, and
great manufacturing improvements, RAM is cheap. There is no good excuse
for not loading up with as much memory as possible.
Vista is the most RAM hungry modern operating system
in existence. One gig is about the lowest amount of memory you can have
without feeling that you’re slogging through a lake of molasses. Two
gigs should give you acceptable response time, and four gigs will put
wings on your PC with some afterburner boost thrown in. Don’t be a
cheapskate. It’s false economy to starve your system of RAM.
If you are already loaded with Ram, you can use
Vista’s built-in ReadyBoost feature in conjunction with a flash memory
card or USB key to give an added kick to system memory. You need a high
performance flash card or USB drive. Insert the device and Vista will
politely ask you if you wish to use the device to speed up system
performance. Answer yes, and then tell Vista exactly how much of the
device to devote to speeding up the system. ReadyBoost will be active as
long as the device is plugged into the system.
Once you have enough memory, examine your video card.
If you want to experience the full graphic capabilities that Vista
offers, buy a video card that’s Vista Premium Certified.
To see how your video card checks out, open up
Control Panel, switch to Classic View, and then activate the
Performance Information and Tools utility. Look at your base
score. This number represents the overall graphic capability of your
system. Notice that your base score is not some combination of all the
subscores. Your base score is the lowest performing member of all your
subscores. That doesn’t seem fair, but that’s reality. You can try
updating your score, but it probably won’t change.
If you get between 1 and 3, general operations which
include word processing and spreadsheet tasks will work fine. Email and
web browsing should be OK, but web sites with large amounts of embedded
graphics will take a long time to load. Video applications will be
problematical.
A base score between 3 and 4 can run Aero and the
majority of the new Vista features, but Vista’s more advanced
capabilities may bog down your system. For example, your monitor will be
satisfactory even at its highest resolution, but multiple monitors may
slow down your system severely. You will be able to watch most TV shows,
but a high definition broadcast could be a slow motion disaster.
A base score higher than 4 should handle anything
that Vista throws at it, including HDTV and 3D gaming. If what you want
or need from Vista requires a higher base score than your system can
provide, you need to replace one or more of your components. Use the
subscores to determine what stays or goes. A low score may require you
to either turn off the Aero interface or upgrade your video card.
Go back to the Control Panel. From the
Classic View activate the System icon and then select
Advanced system settings. When the System Properties dialog
box comes up, click the Settings button in the Performance
section. You’re about to make some tough choices.
If you can’t make decisions, you can Let Windows
choose the best settings for my computer and be done with it.
Adjust for best performance disables all the great visual effects
that make Vista a terrific graphical interface. Adjust for best
appearance makes your system look spiffy, but you’ll take a hit on
speed.
Choosing Custom allows you to make some
reasonable compromises while keeping full control of your PC. Some
features like sliding menus are pure eye candy and do nothing useful.
Turning them off gives performance improvement with no loss of function.
There are options in the Advanced tab where
you can control how the CPU processes work. What’s more important to
you, adjusting for visible performance or making sure that the
housekeeping services Vista performs are performed efficiently? Make
your choice and monitor your system. You can always change it back
later.
Unless you know what you are doing, leave the
Virtual memory section alone. Virtual memory is a portion of a disk
drive that’s configured to masquerade as memory. Because it’s part of a
disk and not physical memory, it can’t work as fast as real memory. When
the system runs out of physical RAM it can use a disk drive to keep
going instead of stopping dead in its tracks.
You can change the location of the file to a
different disk, resize it, or do both. Each choice has consequences of
its own. Making the wrong choice won’t destroy your system, but it could
noticeably slow down performance. The default choice is to let Vista
manage the file. That’s the best choice for most people.
There are many other things that you can do to get
the best possible performance from Vista such as modifying the Index
Options, but that’s a subject for another article. :
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Copyright 2009. This article is from the February 2009 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL
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