Now that the new Ubuntu release has come out triple booting has become very easy. I am now trip booting XP, Vista abd Ubuntu. I have a multitude of reasons for having all three, I am making Ubuntu my full time OS as you know, but Vista still has its merits. For starters, I know it better, so if I need something done quickly thats still where I go. I use XP for the little gaming I do, about once a week I get together with a friend and play some games, XP is still the best for that.

If you take a look at APCmag, you’ll quickly find instructions for double booting Xp and Vista, regardless of which one you have installed first. Then comes the beauty of Hardy Heron, the WUBI install system. This enables you to install Ubuntu from within the Vista environment and Ubuntu will be added to the Windows bootloader. Since I really hate trying to find out how to get Grubb to boot Windows this was a Godsent and now I’m happily and easily booting all three systems.

As a side note, my Feisty used to take at least 3 minutes to load, an error which I read about, but failed to resolve. They seemed to have fixed it in Hardy, so now I don’t spend more than a minute booting any of the three, hip-hip-hooray to Hary and the Ubuntu team.

I have a quite low end laptop and although Vista runs fine because I loaded it with a heaps of memory sometimes I just need that extra oomph. A bumped into a problem the other day, I was doing some batch work with macros and often the macros failed because a window failed to open on time. Now I am talking about doing things at 600% speed, with 50 tabs open if Firefox, so this isn’t a normal speed issue, I needed to find some setting to change that would considerably improve performance at this level. Here are some of the things I came up with that smoothed things out a lot.

Disable window animation

This was probably biggest player of all. My macros minimized and maximized windows, so at 600% speed that’s a lot happening in a short time. Even if you don’t look at load times, the windows need time to pop up, since they slide in from below. Disabling these animations meant that windows would quasi-instantaneously pop up. If you are experiencing jitters ad slow loading times, you can disable window animation like so:

1. Go to the Control Panel and find “System” (you can type “Control Panel\System” into the address bar)
2. Click on Advanced System Settings to the left (if you have UAC enabled, click ok to let yourself in)
3. Click Settings under Performance
4. Remove the tick from “animate windows when minimizing and maximizing”

You can in fact remove ticks from other boxes, all these control visual elements, they are quite self explanatory. The performance impact of each varies, but turning off any animation is bound to help you.

Stopping unwanted processes

People usually have way to many processes running anyway, but if you need the performance, you need to switch off all the processes that aren’t essential. You should start by checking the system tray for running applications. Windows Live Messenger, Skype, antivirus programs, anything you don’t need, just exit.

Next, you should press “Ctr+Shift+Esc” to bring up the task manager. Check your processes, and determine if you have ones you can remove. This may be daunting at first, but even if you switch something off you need, the most harm you can do is a reboot. This means that if you save all your stuff, you can play around in here.

I usually click on the memory column header to take a look at the processes taking up most of my memory. Often browsers are at the top of the list, but by now you should have them closed. It’s very hard to give directions at this point, but take a look at the description of items and you should get a rough idea. You can also do a Google Search on the process, you will find many services to help you.

Change processor scheduling

By default your laptop or PC is optimized to run program efficiently, but sometimes you might want to change that. In the system settings you can choose between optimization for programs, or for background services. I don’t really want to make this official, since I don’t exactly know what’s going on, but I found that if you change the processor scheduling to background services it helps a lot if you are doing video or music editing, resource intensive Photoshop work and so on. To change this settings just follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Control Panel and find “System” (you can type “Control Panel\System” into the address bar)
2. Click on Advanced System Settings to the left (if you have UAC enabled, click ok to let yourself in)
3. Click Settings under Performance
4. Click the Advanced tab
5. Under “Adjust for best performanc of” click the radio button next to background services

Disable search indexing

Indexing is one of the best features in Vista, it enables you to find anything in seconds, but it can be a resource hog at times. Usually it runs pretty smoothly, I’ve never seen a problem with it, but if you need all the juice you can get you nay want to disable it. You will find that if you delete the process it just comes back again, so we need to disable it elsewhere, here’s how:

1. In the Start Menu type “services” and press enter
2. For some reason there’s no search in this list, so order it by name and go down to “W”
3. You need to find “Windows search” and either stop it, or disable it
4. You may also want to stop Windows Firewall and Windows Defender as well

Don’t forget to restart these services though and also note that disabling your firewall and Windows Defender will lower your defenses, although if you’re working offline, you can just unplug the net.

Buy memory

This was one of the best things I ever did to Vista. I found that Vista will run pretty well on low specs if you have enough memory. I am using 2GB RAM right now, which is actually pretty cheap nowadays. This small investment meant at least a three fold performance increase for me.

In Vista there’s a cool feature to use the checkbox selection method to select multiple files or folders. This the need to press the control button, so if you feel more at ease with the mouse this is a great way to select multiple files quickly.

When you hover over an item, you will se a checkox at the top left, if you click there, the item will remain selected, even if you select something else. If you select a file in any other location than the box, it will not remain selected, this gives you a lot of flexibility in handling files, since you can safely look at properties without having to deselect everything else while you’re at it.

To access this feature, head over to Computer, or any folder and click the Organize button on top. Click folder and search options and find the item named “use checkboxes to select items”. If you select this, you will be able to use the feature, not just in the folder views, but while in an open dialog, or on the desktop as well.

For some people this will increase productivity, but those of us used to the keyboard won’t want to give it up, since overall I think it’s faster just using the ctr key. However you do get the huge benefit of being able to click elsewhere, while still having the selected files at your disposal.