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General discussion

How do you speed up Windows Vista Home Premium?

Aug 4, 2010 12:23PM PDT

I recently purchased a used HP Pavillion which has Windows Vista Home Premium. I am quite new to using Vista and from my observations Vista is quite slow. Does anyone have any tips on how to speed up the OS?

Discussion is locked

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Three things
Aug 4, 2010 12:43PM PDT

Three things tend to affect system performance, regardless of OS.

1: CPU
2: RAM
3: # of programs running

Increase the first two and reduce the third.

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Frankly?
Aug 5, 2010 12:10AM PDT

Vista was an OK OS but felt like it had all the drag chutes deployed as your hopped up dragster tried to run the quarter mile.

There's not a lot that we have not done here but add RAM, get a faster CPU with more cores (you want at least 2) and still it doesn't perform.

Microsoft reluctantly admitted this and now you see Windows 7 with much better performances. I think the fix is to go to 7 or if your machine can't do that fall back to XP.
Bob

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I honestly
Aug 5, 2010 10:17AM PDT

I honestly had no complaints about Vista performance for the year or so I ran it. Windows 7 isn't really any faster, they just bumped the priority of certain UI tasks to give the illusion of increased speed. You can make an argument that perception is what matters I suppose, but I'd rather they spent an entire release cycle not doing ANYTHING but security hardening, bug fixing, and performance tuning. No new features, or at least keep them to a modest level.

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Wish that played out for us.
Aug 5, 2010 10:20AM PDT

At the office we changed out over a dozen machines from Vista to 7 and all are relatively flying. Good riddance we say.

Faster boots, faster shutdowns and zippier all around.
Bob