new to vista

[hotwired]

Hi'
I just bought a Dell Inspirion 1420 for travel and it has 2 Gig dual core processor, 120 G HD, 1 G ram and VISTA which makes it a bit slower. I've already disabled indexing, aero, and basically made the gui look like XP again (adjusted for best performance, classic start menu, etc) - I also removed or deleted the backup partition. anything else I can do to tweak this laptop so it screams?? Thanks!

[Mak213]

Hello,

Windows Vista Tweaks - Google Search

Most of the tweaks out there are available through Google. Just have to search till you find ones you like.

Cheers,
Mak

[KurrentEweser]

I'm running a version of Vista Home Premium SP1 that I created with vLite 1.1. Cutting out most of Vista's bloat sped things out a lot. Use a good defrag program like Perfectdisk that defragments the hd using the data collected by Vista's prefetcher will help. It doesn't hurt to to have a 7200 rpm hd also.

Always install the latest versions of software rather than install whatever version you have on hand and then update. Getting rid of the useless crap that Dell pre-installs on new computers will help speed things up also. You'd be surprised on how much junk is running in the background.

As mush as Vista tries to accommodate older programs. There are some programs that just won't work well in Vista. You'll have to live with the consequences if you insist on running them.

Adding another gig of ram will help.

[CalcProgrammer1]

I thought I'd have problems with Vista, but it is fast on my new laptop. My friend has a 1420 with lower specs than yours (1.8GHz I think) and he never had any problems using Aero and virus scanning and firewall and all sorts of background stuff. My laptop has a 5400RPM hard drive and doesn't have any problems.