I'm no geek...

[Mild Thing]

...but I've spoken to a few lately, and they've helped me make some pretty dramatic performance enhancements in my computers.

On my home computer:

Control Panel> System> Advanced> Performance> Settings> Visual Effects> Custom

and I deselected everything but "Use Visual Styles on windows and buttons", and it's greatly inproved the speed on everything.

On the same computer I also chose to use a second, mostly empty internal hard drive for Virtual Memory (in case RAM resources run low):

Control Panel> System> Advanced> Performance> Settings> (Performance options window opens) Advanced> Virtual memory> Change

and selected the recommended perimeters.

On my laptop:

I only just discovered that by default, Vista only operates one processor on a Dual-core. It wasn't slow for most functions, but I were to say try and watch a video in full screen mode, I'd be SOL with the jerky, unsyncronized version and have to revert to normal size- that is until I utilized both processors:

Start> start search> typed in "msconfig"> (System Configuration window opens)> Boot> Advanced (BOOT Advanced Options window opens)

and changed Number of processors from one to two.

I also purchased a 4gb SD card for ReadyBoost (adds Virtual Memory to systems using Vista):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readyboost

All I had to do was insert an empty 4GB SD card into the slot, go with the recommended perimeters, and it does the rest.

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Feel free to correct me, or add to any of this. I ain't the most knowledgable person when it comes to computer stuff, but what I've done as stated above seems to be working great thus far.

[Slomgom_Commie]

Cool info. I'm no geek as well, apparently.