If you are using Vista operating system, you will find that it does not run as quickly and smoothly as XP does. Sometimes, it will take forever to load when starting up the computer. If you are tried of your slow Vista, please do not miss the tips here on how to speed up Vista and then make it run smoothly on low-configuration computers.

To speed up Vista, what you need to do first is to increase the Window popup speed. We all know that Vista uses animation effect when opening windows. For computers which have less memory, this will greatly affect the speed to open windows, slowing down the computer. So you can turn off the animation effect to get faster computer speed. Here is what you should go: open Registry Editor -> locate“HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Window Metrics” brand -> Find “MinAniMate” and change its value data from “1” to “0”. In this way, when starting up the Vista computer, it won’t automatically load the animation effect, which greatly speeds up Windows Vista.

Secondly, to greatly speed up Vista, you should shorten the shutdown time. When shutting down Vista computer, the system itself will automatically close the programs / services which are still running. If there is a program which does not stop working within the system default time, the system will force to close it. So it is necessary to do some preparations before to avoid a waste of time when shutting down the computer. You can follow the steps here to do some modification: Open Registry Editor -> find “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control” -> find and change the value data of “WaitToKillServiceTimeout” to 2000 or less than 2000.

Thirdly, optimize memory. We know that Vista operating system provides us a very gorgeous desktop when compared with XP, but it comes at the expense of large amount of memory. So to speed up Vista, what we need to do is to cancel some unnecessary functions to release more available memory.

1) Cancel Automatic Updates: My Computer ->Properties ->Automatic Updates ->tick “Turn off Automatic Updates” -> click “Ok” to save the settings.
2) Turn off System Restore within System Properties, which operates the same as what you have done to turn off automatic updates.
3) Turn off some unnecessary effects within Visual Effects: My Computer ->Properties ->Advanced -> Settings within “Performance” -> click “Custom” within the appearing “Visual Effects” window. Here, you can cancel the unnecessary items and just leave the three options below: Show shadows under mouse pointer、Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop and Use visual styles on windows and buttons. With the three steps above, it will maximally release at lease 3MB available memory.

Last but not the lease, to get a faster Vista, what you need to do is to disable some unnecessary services. When booting up the computer, some unneeded services will load automatically at background. Though a single service will not take large amount of memory, if accumulated, it will be numerous. So do remember to disable the services that you do not need to start at Windows startup: log in your computer as an administrator ->go to “Start” ->Run ->type “services.msc” and press Enter to access “Services”. Here, you can easily close the services that you do not need.

As what you can see above that, you can greatly speed up Vista with some very simple steps. But to always enjoy a faster windows Vista on low-configuration computers, you still need to take some daily maintenances to always optimize your computer, for example, regularly run a virus scan, Disk Cleanup to delete the unused files and Disk Defragmenter to arrange the files in order.