[Speed Up The Vista Interface]

Speed Up the Interface

Windows Vista features what some of us think is the prettiest graphical user interface in the operating-systems industry. Its stylish transparencies and nifty animations — driven by Direct3D and your graphics card — give it a polished look that's a pleasure to use.

Unfortunately, that shiny, new interface, called Aero, is also a resource hog. If you're running Vista on a PC that's near or just above the system requirements, you might want to shut off some or all of those features.

Here are some actions you might want to take to tweak interface services:

1. Lose the transparency. Right-click the desktop, click "Personalize" and click "Windows Color and Appearance." Uncheck "Enable Transparency." Click "OK."

2. Get rid of the Sidebar. It's cool, but some of those gadgets chow down on memory. Right-click the Sidebar, click "Properties" and uncheck "Start Sidebar When Windows Starts." Click "OK." Then right-click the Sidebar and click "Close Sidebar." If you ever want it back, you can simply click the Start button and key in "sidebar" and hit "Enter."

3. Get rid of some of the visual effects. Open Control Panel, click "Performance and System Tools" and click "Adjust Visual Effects." In the resulting window, you can uncheck line items for animations, fades and other effects; or simply click "Adjust For Best Performance."

4. Go with a non-Aero theme. To get rid of Aero entirely, use the Windows Classic, Windows Vista Basic or Windows Standard theme. Right-click the desktop, click "Personalize" and click "Windows Color and Appearance." Click "Open Classic Appearance Properties" . and choose a theme in the Color Scheme list box. Click "OK."

When you perform such tweaks, Windows Vista won't look as pretty. It will, however, respond much faster. A high-end system might not benefit a whole lot from these adjustments, but they'll improve low-end computers.

So essentially, turn off all that is good about Vista, so that Vista will run? This is one time that I have to love Mac for creating its own hardware, because it will always be enough to support the beautiful effects that the latest gen of OSs provide.