I have been using Vista for getting on for a year now. My overwhelming impression of the operating system is that it is unusably slow. Everything I read about it on the web is that is has some wonderfully clever technology to make it run faster.
I tried various performance tweaks. I have two gigabytes of RAM, which should be enough, but I put in a fast USB memory device to give my system a 'turbo boost', i.e. an extra (solid state) disk to hold the sectors cached by superfetch. None of this made any appreciable differerence and my system ran unusably slowly.
Finally I decided to bite the bullet and disable Superfetch all together (I used these instructions). This had the most astonishing impact on the performance of my system.
I do not know why superfetch does not work for me. "Your Mileage May Vary" as they used to say, but for me the impact of setting a byte in the registry from value 3 to value 0 has made an astonishing difference. I have a sneaky suspicion that it is because I have a *lot* of applications running the whole time. Certainly Word, Excel, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Nomadesk, Skype, MSN and so on and so on. Taskmanager informs me that I have 93 processes running. Other users I've observed seem to want to close applications when they've finished editing a document. My attitude is 'well, I'm going to edit another doc soon, or make further edits to the one that's already loaded; if the app is not used for a while it will be paged out anyway, so why would I bother to shut it down'. Maybe that's the wrong attitude. When it comes to Skype, YM, MSN messenger and Nomadesk.
Anyway, I'm too busy to make blog entries, but I just had to report this success as I've been searching for a way of making my Vista PC perform even approximately as fast as my XP machine for ages.
I am now tempted to switch off prefetch in Vista to see what happens.
