Well basically the only good thing about windows is the fact that games work on it. And vista is just like all the other widows that had just come out, a hive of nasty bugs, you do anything even remotely complex and you get stung, so what i will do is remove all the features that 'optimize' the operating system's performance 'optimize' is microsoft lingo for 'ruin'. So what you do is cut out all the pre-caching of everything, remove all the unwanted drivers, get rid of the stupid themes, and the languages, keyboards, even fonts, this stops all of them from loading and slowing down your startup and wasting ram. Als you can squish in a lot more onto your install disk. My entire windows installation including, Open office, all drivers and winrar and foxit reader and firefox and flashget and everything needed for work takes up a grand total of 1 gig. Normally Xp alone is 3gig. And it is a butt load faster. You can cut out all the support for crap you dont use, and i basically use NOTHING, this pc is for games, the internet and to be used as a glorified typewriter. Just buy yourself a spindle of cd's and get cutting, get rid of as much as you possibly can, you can't break any hardware if you don't deselect any of the red options(don't touch them) and leave networking alone, except for internet explorer and net meeting.
Oh and you can make your setup unattended so all in all it takes me 1 hour in total to format and have my entire pc back as it was.
Nlite makes windows stable. just don't use any other microsoft products, you can get rid of everything, like security centre which is total crap, and that popup that say that drivers are not trusted and all the crap the makes the otherwise very good windows kernel work like rubbish.
Trust me, you will not go back if you make yourself a good one. i can give you my config files if you want, though they don't have any camera support or anything basically, no phones, nothing, they are for a pc that never uses any rich boy gadgets. You can cut out windows media player too! best thing EVER. oh and you can add service packs, my config won't work for that... So i think it is best you just make your own, it seems a bit daunting at first but you wont believe how fast your pc ACTUALLY is. Read *everything* (except red options, just leave them alone) carefully and don't play around with data execution prevention or you wont be able to use daemon tools... And don't mess with the step where you can recompress the archives to save space on the disk, if you really needed to get that 4 meg extra you could just find a smaller driver file. Like omega versus catalyst.
nLite is awesome.
I still need to wait for a newer version of vLite cause it is not very descriptive of the vista features and i don't want to leave something in that is useless, or cut something out that is not. I don't even use a background, cause every 7 minutes or so windows refreshes, using memory. I only use 50mb memory before drivers, the Razer and ATI ones i have use a quite a bit. If you need that extra little bit of ram what you can do is end the explorer process and then run your game via the task manager's run function.
If you get it right and you don't mind having a spartan looking windows then you won't go back, You can reskin it of course but who cares, the games graphics matter, not the dumb arse menus. The tweaks are useful, they are the last section. USE THEM, you can make your windows something wonderful as opposed to wanton.
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