I tend to use lot of software applications not just because I am a software geek but also because I have to try out many applications sometimes to blog or at others just to see if the product is worth keeping on my system. No matter what I give it a shot. This is all good except that I usually forget once I have used the product that I should uninstall it if it’s not useful enough for me. This no doubt slows down my PC considerably.

Now keeping your windows computer clean is indeed best practice and uninstalling the unused or lesser used programs seems like a good idea. It has to be taken into consideration though that your system doesn’t remove all the mess that a new software program brings along with itself while installation. The Windows Opearting Systems have an inefficient uninstall mechanism which only does the soft unistallation leaving behind the huge chunks of registery codes behind. This calls for some special programs.

The average users can try out some third party applications to clean out the mess or to uninstall the applications more stealthily. One option is to use better uninstall applications and then it’s wise to use a registry cleaner so that the application that you have uninstalled doesn’t leave behind any traces left in your system.

It’s time for me to uninstall some applications and then clean all the registry mess. Hopefully or quite certainly my system will get a new lease of life after that.

Windows Vista has many great new features for making backups. Window Vista even saves the previous versions of your documents and the system state points which are part of system restore. These features are genius, useful too but these take up a lot of hard drive space.

Clean up your backups and restore points.

• Go to start.
• Type in disk cleanup. Press Enter.
• Select Files from all users on this computer.

• Select the drive you want to clean. Press Enter
• Now go to the More Options tab.
• Click on Clean up in the field System Restore and Shadow Copies.
• Press Delete.

One thing that I hate a lot on Microsoft Vista, is the User Account Control. I like working with Microsoft Vista not as much as I love working with Mac. But I get too much annoyed by “Windows needs your permission to continue”. It happens a lot, please have it disabled by following these steps:

• Firstly go to your Control Panel
• Simply type in the search bar “UAC”.
• This will bring you to Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off, select off.
• For once again the annoying “Windows needs your permission to continue” window pops-up, please continue.
• Restart your computer to complete this process.

And if you want to speed up your system, it is fairly easy to see improved performance by disabling the Windows Search Service. Follow these simple steps to disable Windows Search Service.

• Go to Start.
• Go to Control Panel.
• Select on System and Maintenance.
• Then Click on Administrative Tools.
• Now double click on Services.
• Go to Windows Search
• Right Click and go to properties

Now click on the Stop button to stop the indexing service.

Now select Disabled from the dropdown box.

Press Apply and OK and you’re done

If you are on Windows Vista and your system’s running slow? you must be thinking your would need additional RAM, cause that is the best way to improve a PC’s performance. However, upgrading memory is obviously involved with a cost and some systems have limited memory expansion capabilities, making it impossible to add RAM.

Windows Vista has a new way to improve your performance, speed up. With help of Ready Boost. Now you can use a USB flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory to your system.
The flash memory device acts as an additional memory cache, which means that your computer can access the necessary data much quicker than it can access data on the hard drive. This is how you can Speed Up Vista with Vista Ready Boost.

As you plugin you USB, you would see a pop-up with the option “Speed up my system, using Windows Ready Boost”. If this pop up doesn’t appear you can go to Start- My Computer- Right click on your flash drive- Select Properties then choose ReadyBoost.

Now select “Use this device” and tweak the settings, click apply and you’re done.

The minimum requirement for the USB is at least 256mb but It is recommended to use a 1GB flash drive just to be sure. If you have a spare USB and a spare USB2.0 slot it’s absolutely a quick tweak. More importantly it seems to work.

The ISO files are rare breed and they need to be mounted on CD’s or DVD’S to make any use, so it’s almost imperative for you to know how it’s done. There are quite a few softwares which you can use to do this but Virtual Clone Drive is perhaps the best out there. The fact that it’s a freeware makes it a completely irresistible utility to mount .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF, .BIN files and not just .ISO files.

There is a utility that can be used, called Virtual Clone Drive. This utility will let you mount .ISO, .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF and .BIN files. Download the utility and start the setup process. You will need to install the software from their website and then complete the installation with all the defaults.

The Virtual Clone Drive only takes 1 MB space on your hard disk so it should not bother a lot to those guys who keep their hard disks full with movies and games. You will be prompted to to restart the computer for the settings to take place. On restarting you will find an entry by the name of Virtual Clone Drive under Removable Disks in explorer. It has worked for me very well and

Virtual Clone Drive gives you the ability to mount up to 8 virtual drives at once.

Simply start the virtual drive under My Computer and select the image you would like to mount or just select by double clicking the image file itself.

Virtual Clone Drive also lets you to view a history of what was mounted before.

• Virtual CD-ROM (Microsoft) - This utility does not work in Windows Vista
• MagicDisk - This is a nice, free utility, but it isn’t very easy to install in Vista64.
• Alcohol 52% - Free version of Alcohol 120, but it bundles a browser toolbar that they claim isn’t spyware. It’s unacceptable.
• Daemon Tools - Well known tool, but the latest version installs spyware on your computer, and the old version doesn’t work in Vista.

Microsoft released the Windows Vista SP1 for download. It is supposed to includes various performance improvements which will make the operating system more stable and likable.

Windows Vista SP1 will be made available through Windows Update marked as “optional update” during April. You can currently get standalone installers. The bulk is due to all the language packages that are included within these standalone installers. Vista SP1 will just weigh about 65MB, if downloaded through Windows Update.

Download: Vista SP1 32-bit (434.5MB) |Vista SP1 64-bit (726.5MB)

Some significant improvements that SP1 for Vista will bring are as follows:

• Power consumption and battery life will be improved.
• Improved performance over Windows Vista’s current performance:
  • on 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine.
  • on 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system.
  • up to 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system.
• Improved speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.
• Improved the copy progress estimation when copying files within Windows Explorer to about two seconds.
• Improvements to Windows Superfetch that help to further improve resume times, in many environments.
• Windows Vista SP1 contains a new compression algorithm for the Remote Desktop Protocol that helps reduce network bandwidth.
• It will allow support for hotpatching, a reboot-reduction servicing technology designed to maximize uptime. It works by allowing Windows components to be updated while they are still in use by a running process.
• It also includes a number of changes which allow computer manufacturers and consumers to select a default desktop search program similar to the way they currently select defaults for third-party web browsers and media players.
• With the new Service Pack 1, Windows Vista will report the amount of system memory installed rather than report the amount of system memory available to the OS. Therefore 32-bit systems equipped with 4GB of RAM will report all 4GB in many places throughout the OS, such as the System Control Panel. However, this behavior is dependent on having a compatible BIOS, so not all users may notice this change.