How To Make Vista Useful!

I reinstalled Vista yesterday, this should prove to be interesting. The graphics drivers crashed and mucked up (but Vista recovered rather quickly) within a few minutes of my initial boot. To be fair, they were the “default” drivers, and I have a complex setup (laptop, external display, etc). Regardless of which, I found that a few changes need to be made to make Vista useful:

— Turn off UAC (Control Panel > User Accounts > Turn UAC On or Off)

— Turn Off Windows Firewall (Control Panel > Windows Firewall > Turn Windows Firewall On or Off)

— Turn off Windows Defender (Control Panel > Windows Defender > Tools > Options — Turn off real time & Scheduled)

If you have a decent graphics card you can probably run Areo without a problem. I can, but if you are like me, you want all the speed you can. First thing to do is to go and set the theme to Windows Classic (Control Panel > Personalization > Theme). The other thing to do is turn off the extra performance options (Control Panel > System > Advanced system settings > Performance > Settings > Adjust for best performance).

I’ll also be running down compatibility issues as I find them in the next few days or a week. I’ll probably have alot more posts due to this, but they are all Vista related. Well, until I get to installing XP & Debian on this machine — yes… Yes I am insane enough to try and triple boot. We’ll see how it goes.