Continuing in our guide to make Windows Vista faster, today we look at running programs in administrator mode quickly, prioritising the most important programs, repairing your hard drive and optimising the search function.
21. Prioritise Your Programs
It’s possible to give programs different levels of priority to the processor, which can help improve performance in processor-intensive programs like multimedia tools (including Windows Media Player) and games at the expense of other programs.
Run intensive programs with higher levels of priority for better performance
By default all programs run with a priority level of Normal, but it’s possible to raise this to AboveNormal or even High. To do so, right-click the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Locate your program on the Applications tab, right-click it and choose Go to Process. Now right-click the selected process and choose Priority to give it a new level – don’t choose RealTime as this will give the program priority over Windows Vista itself, and may even bring your system grinding to a halt.
22. Always Run at Different Priority
You can tweak a program’s shortcut so that every time it’s launched it runs at a higher priority. Change high to abovenormal or whichever priority you wish to use.
a) Enter Shortcut Command
Right-click the shortcut and select Properties. Type the following into the beginning of the Target box, before the path and filename: cmd.exe /c start “” /high
b) Change Program Icon
Click Apply. The shortcut icon will change to a command prompt, so click Change Icon followed by Browse… Select the program file the shortcut opens and click Open. You’ll see the program icon appear – select this and click OK twice to finish.
23. Choose a Lower Priority
Don’t elevate too many programs to AboveNormal or High – instead, look at some background programs and consider lowering their priority level to BelowNormal or Low, so they don’t compete so fiercely for processor time, helping to boost performance elsewhere.
24. Quickly Gain Elevated Rights
Press the [Windows] key to launch the Start menu and type in the program you’re looking for – press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Enter] followed by [Alt] + [C] and you’ll launch it with full administrator rights without having to click once.
25. Disable Security Prompts
The simplest way to disable UAC is using the free Tweak VI tool.
The free basic version of Tweak VI includes some nifty tweaks that can speed up your PC. First up, the program will disable User Accounts Control for you during installation if you wish, removing the confirmation dialogs that appear when you perform administrative-level tasks. Remember though that you’re compromising security for convenience, so disable it with care.
26. Optimise Superfetch
Windows Vista’s SuperFetch settings are designed to maximise performance, and Tweak VI has a section dedicated to occasionally flushing the logs to clear things out and optimise it. To access this, select System Information and Tweaks > Hard drive information… and switch to the ‘Prefetcher’ and ‘SuperFetch’ optimization tab.
Click this button to clean up the Prefetch folder
27. Go Tweaking
Explore the other areas of Tweak VI and see what you can find – there’s a section on improving performance based on your processor, plus other tips and tweaks too. Make sure you take a System Restore point before tweaking though, in case you push your machine too far.
28. Defrag Your Hard Drive
Set a schedule for defragmenting your drive.
Defragmenting your hard drive basically rearranges the files on it so they’re loaded quicker, speeding up your PC as a result. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows Vista runs the Disk Defragmenter automatically on a weekly basis to stay on top of this. You can run the program manually or change the schedule to daily or monthly by typing defrag into the Start menu’s Search box.
29. Turn Off Automatic Defragmentation
Your PC slows down while the Defragmenter is running, so you might prefer to set it to run manually – turn off scheduling by unticking “Run on a Schedule (recommended)”. Alternatively, pick a time when you’re away from your PC – say your lunch hour – so it doesn’t interfere with your work.
30. Boost Your Hard Drive
Many PCs now ship with SATA hard drives, which are superior to the older IDE standard. If you’re running a laptop or a PC connected to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) you can speed things up by switching on its advanced features. To do this, click Start, type Device Manager and press [Enter]. Open the Disk Drives section, right-click your hard drive and choose Properties > Policies tab. Write caching should already be enabled, so tick “Enable advanced performance” and click OK.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
