Windows Vista Maintenance and Performance Tutorial
Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows Vista takes pretty much care of itself: disk defragmentation, for example, is automatically run every Wednesday at 1AM. As long as your computer is left running, Vista will keep your hard drive in good health. To search fast the content of your hard drive, Vista automatically indexes the content of your computer when it is idle. These are just some of the examples of how Windows Vista makes it easier for most users.
Along with automated and manual maintenance, this series of tutorials will also cover Vista performance, and show you a number of tweaks that will make your computer faster, or at the very least seem faster.
Windows Vista's Task Manager shows quite a few "background processes", or programs run directly by Windows to take of things behind the scenes.
Vista is more "resource hungry" than its predecessors, so if your computer's processor and memory are not enough, disabling non-essential services and startup programs can speed up Windows Vista quite a bit.
Windows Vista: Performance and System Requirements
Previous versions of Windows tended to slow down if the computer had been left on for extended periods of times (a few weeks). Likewise, Windows XP and previous versions would slow down after a year or more of normal use: re-installing Windows was typically the only true way to regain initial performance. This is no longer true with Vista, and, in our experience with various machines, performance after a year-and-a-half of relatively heavy usage shows no sign of decreasing performance: Vista is as fast as when it first booted. Since this difference is noticeable even when compared with well maintained XP machines (which is not the case with most users), the so-called "average users" will see great performance boost compared to Windows XP and previous versions.
Unlike previous versions of Windows, which ran fine on minimum system requirements, you are well advised to purchase a computer that exceeds its minimum requirements. Vista enjoys having at least 2 gigabytes of memory at its disposal, when only 1Gb is suggested as minimum memory requirement. Some of the tutorials in this section will discuss the mainly three components to keep in mind when purchasing a computer to run Windows Vista.