Windows as of late seem to be focusing on safety but the tools they have implemented to do this cripple the OS, for example UAC (User Access Control) it’s there to keep you safe but just become an annoyance, so the first thing we are going to disable is UAC, now if you have decent internet security on your machine (not Norton or McAfee) then chances are it’s safe to turn it off.

Second thing we are going to turn off is the Search Indexer, it is there to speed up file finding but if you keep everything tidy in the first place then it’s not needed and can be disabled to free up some memory.

Third Thing you can do if you have a small amount of total memory is use vista’s and windows 7′s “Ready Boost”. This allows you to use any old pen drive you have lying around as RAM. Any size will do 128mb all the way up to 8Gb.

Forth thing to do is turn off Aero if it’s crippling you system. Aero is the flashy yet resource heavy theme that comes with Vista and Windows 7, if you have small memory and/or an old graphics card then it may improve system performance to turn it off and use the Basic theme.

Fifth thing to do is tell Vista or Windows 7 to use more than one core and more memory on start-up this can be done by typing msconfig in the search bar and going into the boot section then advanced options, there you will have the option to use 1 to #cores you have and the amount of memory it can have. The best option to use it all the cores you have and half the memory (don’t worry it wont use half all the time, just at boot-up)

Sixth thing to do is get rid of unwanted start-up programs anything like messenger or MS office. Stopping these speeds up the login and desktop loading times.

Lastly if you have Norton or McAfee as your internet security I strongly urge you to uninstall it and get something like Kaspersky (if you want to pay for it) or AVG/Avast Free edition. The main reason is Norton and McAfee use up an un-needed amount of memory and CPU resources.

Now we dive into special programs that do all the hard stuff for you, the program we are going to use is TweakNow WinSecret. This program is free and very easy to use but I will still be using some visual tools to smooth the process.

The first thing you will need to do on Windows 7 is put it into compatibility mode for Vista SP2 because for some reason even though Windows 7 is supported it can’t read the memory and bottle’s out.

First thing you’ll want go into is the Windows Core area which is shown below:

Then you’ll have a new window with the following options:

Windows Prefetch – you’ll want to leave that alone and just empty the prefetch using the button at the bottom.

Windows Time Out – You can set the number to whatever you feel but the best option is clicking the “Recommended” button at the bottom.

Cache – This gives you the option to keep data in the RAM rather than the Page File, this is supposed to speed things up but I found it hogs a lot of memory on long uses, nearly filling my 6Gb, so we leave this option alone.

Miscellaneous – This gives you three options Automatic Restart, NTFS File System and Library files. We leave the first two alone and just check the “Force Windows to unload DLL’s after program close”

Security – This gives you the option to unload the page file on shut down, this doesn’t do much other than make your PC shut down take 3 times as long so we leave that unchecked.

You then save and close the sub window.

We now go onto the Network and Internet Button back on the main screen.

We are now met with 3 sub-tabs.

On the “General” Tab just check the “SACK” option.

We leave the “MTU” tab alone

We then go to the “Others” Tab and check the MTU Auto Discovery box as well as putting the number of connections of HTTP 1 and 1.1 to 10. Save and then close the sub window.

Well that’s it for this article, if there is any other tips you have and want me to add just drop a comment and I’ll put it in.