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Vista Tips, or things you'll want to disable right away

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Darwin:
Sadly, I'm not the only one who would be gazing on whatever graces my desktop, so I have a limited range of options available to me in selecting wallpaper  :( Fortunately, like you, I can't stomach wasting valuable resources on eye candy (yeah, I know, what was I thinking when I bought WindowBlinds?!  :-[) so it's not really such a hardship  :D

f0dder:
Aero is completely HW accelerated and uses your GPU for all the effects.
-MrCrispy
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Funny thing is that it feels no faster than the XP gui... but people tend to forget that GDI has been hardware accelerated for ages, even if not using superfancy 3d.

As for services, I use dto do that with XP, but in the end its just not worth it, IMO. Anything which is not getting used is simply going to be paged out, and will not affect the system.
-MrCrispy
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It's better not to load in the first place, than having to page out. Paging out = writing to disk = slow. Also, reducing unnecessary services can mean a faster system boot (even with all the fancy features for faster booting added in vista).

Even on my XP box, I've set the VMWare and PerfectDisk services to manual load, since I don't run these programs very often... shaves some time off booting, and saves about 30 megs of physical memory (not a lot compared to the 2gig I got in my system, perhaps, but it's still 30 megs that can be used for other stuff).

MrCrispy:
Its hard to make the GUI in normal use feel 'faster' - most of the time the cpu and gpu are idling, and even a pc from 5 years ago could do overlapping windows. However, start playing videos, have an unresponsive app or two, drag the windows around, and see how quickly the screen repaints and what the overall effect is. This is where Vista (and OSX with Quartz Extreme, and Beryl, and pretty much any composited desktop with display buffering) will shine. GDI has been accelerated but only for drawing. Vista has a completely new unified memory architecture that can page video memory and use it uniformly, alogwith the gpu.

I agree with you on services, I do the same (manual start). But it requires expert knowledge and many times can do more harm than good, esp if you turn off rarely used but important services. For a normal user like my friends/parents, I'd advise them to leave such things as they are!

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