Ed suggests the same thing I’ve found so far, disabling most services gains you nothing, and in the end will probably just caused you problems. Keep reading →

Lifehacker had a feature download today that caught my eye. Called TweakUAC, this utility allows you to quickly ‘quiet’ Vista’s UAC (you know, the one that keep asking if you want to allow things). There are many ways to do this already, but TweakUAC does it without a reboot, which makes it much nicer for quickly turning off and back on again. Keep reading →

You connect a USB keyboard to a Windows Vista-based computer. Then, you view the devices on the computer in Device Manager. When you view the Driver tab of the parent USB host controller, you notice that you do not have an option to disable the device. The Disable button on the Driver tab of the parent USB host controller appears dimmed, and it is not available.

If you disconnect the USB keyboard from the computer, and then you update the view in Device Manager, the Disable button is available.

You enable either of the following policy settings:

• Hide and disable all items on the desktop on a domain controller
• Disable all items in Windows Vista

Then, you experience the following symptoms:

• A black desktop appears on the Windows Vista-based client computers that are affected by either of these policy settings.
• This black desktop replaces the image that is configured as the background wallpaper.

  Note: The Windows Vista Gadgets still appear on the desktop in Windows Vista.

You experience this problem if you use the Desktop Wallpaper policy setting to configure an image as the background wallpaper in Windows Vista.

Note: For more information about how to view the Desktop Wallpaper policy setting, see the “More Information” section.

Vista’s new TCP/IP stack offers plenty of improvements, but unfortunately doesn’t always play well with older hardware that isn’t aware of the newer features it uses. Steve Riley on Security mentions that this can be a problem when trying to use wireless networking with a router that doesn’t understand the updated ‘Windows Tuning’ feature. He suggests this is more common with routers used for public internet connections, such as at a hotel. The fix is to disable autotuning, which happens to be the same fix from tip 25 which dealt with threaded network applications. Keep reading →

Vista has a lot of Services. The more expensive your version of Vista, the more services it has. By default, many of these services run automatically when you start your computer, whether you need them or not. If you don’t need them, they’re just using memory and processor time that could best be used by something else. This is why you may want to turn some of them off. Keep reading →

I‘ve been using Vista for a while now, and the fancy Aero transparency is really no big deal. I’ve seen a number of sources that say it doesn’t slow down your system, so you probably don’t need to disable it in the interest of increasing performance. If you just don’t like the way it looks, Tech-Recipes suggests it is something you can disable. Keep reading →

One of my colleague mentioned he didn’t like ClearType in the new IE7, the same ClearType that’s on by default in Vista. I don’t mind it myself, but if you find it to be ‘blurry’, or just don’t want it on, you can disable it. Keep reading →

If you hate waiting for Vista to load when you start your computer, hibernation is one way to significantly speed up boot. It basically copies your memory to disk and then shuts down. When you start the computer again, it just loads your RAM from disk, and you’re up and running where you left off previously. The downside of this is that a file must be created on your hard drive to hold this memory, and the file will be as large as the amount of RAM you have. On my computer that’s 2GB, and if you’ve got 4GB of RAM, well, you do the math! If you don’t use hibernate, you can turn it off and save yourself this disk space. Keep reading →