ChaseandSam.com

Welcome Fox6 viewers to ChaseandSam.com - and thanks for watching our weekly Tech Check segment. On tonight’s Tech Check, Sam and I gave you some tips for speeding up Windows Vista. Please note - you should NOT implement all of these tips, but choose maybe two or three that you are comfortable with, and give them a shot. Some of these tips will increase your system performance overall, but at the expense of another convenience - for instance, our first tip will speed your computer up generally, but make your file searches a bit slower. The tip listed below on an external site (How to turn off UAC, or User Access Control) will not necessarily speed up your system overall, but will make it much, much less annoying (by not requiring you to approve every file move and every program install). The trade off is that a novice Vista user will not be as protected against malware with UAC turned off. You should only follow this tip if you are an experienced computer user, and understand the (slight) risk.

Tip # 1: Turn off Windows Vista Search Indexing:

The first tip we told you about tonight was how to speed your system up by turning off persistent search indexing. In order to speed up the finding of certain files, Windows Vista is constantly monitoring your hard drive and indexing your files. This can impact performance - at times significantly. To turn this feature off:

1. Click Start, then click on Computer
2. Right Click Your C drive
3. Uncheck the box labeled “Index this File for faster searching”
4. On the next dialog box that pops up, select “include subfolders and files”

(note: there is a quicker, but more advanced way to accomplish this: See instruction number three on this page)

Tip #2: Turn off Windows Vista automatic disk defragmenting:

You might also want to turn off automatic disk defragmentation, and manually defragment your disk (once a month, roughly) or use a third party application to perform regular defragmenting on your drive when your computer is on, but not being used) Turning off auto-defrag can speed up your system’s overall performance, as Windows will sometimes attempt to defrag your drive while you are in the process of doing something important. To turn off this feature:

1. Click the Start button, then select “computer” then right click on your “c” drive.
2. Select “Properties” then select the “Tools” tab
3. Select “Defragment now” (Don’t worry - it won’t try to defragment your drive, contrary to what the button says”
4. Uncheck “Run on a schedule”

There are some other great tips on speeding up your Vista system available at the link below, but please note that (for most users) we don’t recommend following tip number 3, and some of the other tips should only be undertaken by advanced users.

Click here for Windows Vista Speed Tips

Thanks for stopping by, and we hope these tips are helpful to you!