Turn off unnecessary Windows features.

By default, Vista comes with tons of features that are enabled based on assumptions which may or may not apply to you. Hence you get a system that is running lots of background processes, most of which you do not need at all. So one of the great ways to speed up Windows Vista is to disable them. To see the list of Windows features and turn them on or off, go to Control Panel, change to “Classic View”, click on “Program Features” and then select “Turn Windows Features On And Off″. Some examples of features you may want to disable are:

- Remote Differential Compression

- Windows Meeting Space

- Tablet PC optional components

- And so on.

Graphical features.

One of the better ways to speed up Windows Vista is to turn off fanciful graphical features if you are not too much into aesthetics. One example is the Aero feature. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in ‘systempropertiesperformance’. At the Visual Effects tab, uncheck ‘Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing’. This will do the job. There are many graphical features that you can take out from here. This can give you more immediate results as compared to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Turn off Windows Indexing.

The Windows Indexing service was initially designed to be one of the ways to speed up Windows Vista by shortening the search time for files. However, as the volume of hard disk increases exponentially, the service has proven to be a resource intensive program causing massive slowdowns when Windows start to index the millions of files in the system. Select Start then choose Computer, right click on your C Drive and select properties. Under the General Tab, uncheck “Index this drive for faster searching”. On the next dialog box, choose “Include subfolders and files”. Do the same for the other Drives.

Remove Spyware and Trojans and protect your system against future attacks.

Out of the many ways to speed up Windows Vista, this has to be one of the most crucial things you need to do. This is because not only your system performance is at stake, the security and confidentiality of your data is too. Use free tools such as Avast for anti-virus protection, Spybot for spyware removal and protection as well as Zonealarm for firewall protection. There are other good tools around but make sure they are not spywares themselves!

Remove unnecessary start up programs.

When Vista boots up, many programs run at the start up either in the background or as pop up Windows. Many of these you do not need. You need to take control and eliminate these memory suckers that are lurking in the background. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in ‘msconfig’, choose the Startup tab and uncheck any items that you do not want to auto-load and click OK.

Defrag your hard disk.

This may not be new to you but if you are thinking of using the Windows Defragmentation Tool in Vista, you can forget about it. Instead, use a free 3rd party tool known as Defraggler (Google it for the download link). It is still quite effective in comparison to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Clean your registry.

One of the often neglected portions of Windows is the registry itself. Many do not realized that one of the best ways to speed up Windows Vista is to make sure the registry is clear of invalid entries that causes Windows to perform unnecessary tasks. Cleaning the registry has other advantages too. In certain cases you can remove Windows errors that pop up during boot up.