I’ve seen tons of people complaining about how slow Vista is and honestly, I was really confused; to me, Vista is about the same speed as XP (not as fast as a tweaked Win2k3 though). Then I found out why, because I always change some settings to make it faster, whereas the Vista you get on most preinstalled PCs is bogged down. Here’s (in my somewhat-supported opinion) the biggest source of Vista why-does-this-take-so-fing-long’ness, in order:

1. Antivirus Software
2. Windows Defender
3. Windows Search (ie the Indexer)

Antivirus is really, really slow

According to Coding Horror via Oli at The PC Spy, if you run Norton Internet Security 2006, your disk access speed increases by 2369%. That means, a program that takes 10 seconds to load now takes minutes. And if you have Antivirus on Vista as it recommends, you also have Windows Defender, which means that every time that you load a program, two system-level services scan the program against two separate databases.

…and you don’t need it!

Here’s a secret that Symantec and McAfee don’t want you to know: if you always run Windows Update when the little globe tells you to, you’ll avoid 95%+ of computer viruses, especially if you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser which will help you avoid the Spyware problem. Almost all the famous outbreaks that bring down thousands of PCs were already fixed by Microsoft before they broke out! Don’t bother with Antivirus, instead keep backups of your data on a separate machine; there are lots of programs that let you make backups to other machines or to a USB drive – use them and make it automatic, so you don’t have to think about it. Turn off Windows Defender by going into Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services, and mark the Windows Defender service as “Disabled”. There’s also a way to disable it via the Windows Defender program but I’m too lazy to find it. So in summary:

• Always run the updates. Seriously.
• Don’t use Antivirus / Antispyware / whatever, make automatic backups instead
• Turn off Windows Defender

The other culprit – Windows Search

Now, if you fixed the two things listed above, your computer should already be running much better. However, there’s one feature of Windows Vista that can put a hurt on performance, particularly if you have a laptop – Windows Search. This feature is actually pretty useful though, so if your computer is “fast enough”, you should probably leave it on. It runs a program in the background called the Windows Indexing Service that watches for new and changed files: when it finds one, it scans through it looking for the text and puts it in a database. Later, when you run Search using the Start menu or through another program like Outlook 2007, you can quickly find things.

The downside of Windows Search

The Windows Indexer tries to be smart and not run while you’re working; however, it’s really hard for these kinds of programs to not slow you down, because to work perfectly they have to read your mind. For example, you’re looking for pictures of landscapes, and you download a zip file online with 500 stock pictures and unzip it. You then find out that all of these pictures are of cute kittens, so you’re like “Well this is useless, deleted!”.

The indexer on the other hand does this: First, it sees that there are 500 new pictures to index – it freaks out and starts reading all the information like resolution, tags, camera type, etc from all of these pictures, causing your hard disk to be very busy. Then, when the user deletes the files, the indexer goes crazy again and has to remove all the entries it just created from its database. Now admittedly, for most people this isn’t going to happen often, but if you’re a developer with tons of files that change all the time, you’re gonna feel it. You can disable the indexer the same way, by going to the Services window and setting “Windows Indexing Service” to disabled. If you can (I’m not sure), set the Indexer to only run on specific directories that you know would be useful to index, like the Documents directory. This way you get the benefits of WDS without the slow’osity.