Software Salariman: Windows Vista First Impressions

Saturday, 5 May 2007

Windows Vista First Impressions

Started playing with Windows Vista Home Premium (that's a mouthful). First thing I noticed was the eye candy. Desktop is very pretty. Second thing I noticed was how slow network transfers were. So slow that nothing happened when I tried to transfer files from my old computer to my new one.

Applied the following tweaks from Top 10 Vista Speed Tweaks.

Disabled Indexing. I choose Google Desktop for indexing my computer.
Turned of Remote Differential Compression.
Turned off Windows Defender.
Disk Defragmentation is not scheduled.
Didn't try the USB boost option.
Didn't try the Hibernation option.
Left System Restore feature running. It seems like good insurance.
Disabled User Account Control (UAC). Those Apple Get a Mac - Security ads were spot-on. UAC is such a pain in the neck if you want to do anything remotely resembling system administration.
Disabled some unused services.

I also did the following:

Turned off Remote Assistance.
Removed Symantec Norton. This program also installed its own network adapters. Speed improved from less than 1 MB/sec to 2.3 MB/sec, which is about 50% the speed of my wireless router. Good enough for transferring my files from one computer to another.
Turned off the Firewall. My router has a hardware firewall and I prefer Sygate software firewall.

Labels: Annoyances, Windows