Josh's Windows Weblog

I would say this surprises me, but then again we are talking about Digg.

I guess it depends on the kind of user you are. For example, take a look at vLite by nuhi. It is used by many people to get rid of a lot of crap in Vista including "Windows Defender, turn of User Account Control, disable System Restore" and in truth that does speed up user system considerably and use less system memory.

While it may not be safe to do that for some types of users, those are still valid ways to increase performance. I remember nuhi once said at MSFN that the only thing he even keeps in Vista using vLite is "Media Class Scheduler, IE (with Microsoft HTML engine) and Aero."

Those tweaks are not about security nor was it about security in the first place. They are about performance/speed.

Best thing to do for speed and performace of vista is to have more RAM.  My PC runs really smootly

Sure, RAM always helps but again there are folks who just don't think its necessary for that stuff to be running on their system. After all, neither Defender or UAC were a part of XP and people ran just fine without those. As for System Restore, it can be useful but again not everyone needs it.

Some folks have systems with 512MB RAM that are borderline for running Vista and don't/can't buy more memory for their system. Shutting down a lot of those features helps them minimize resource usage and doesn't make security any worse than in XP so what's the harm?

As for getting a Readyboost drive, Readyboost doesn't really offer much help in performance boost, a bit perhaps, but it won't help much in those features they suggest disabling.

ReadyBoost doesn't boost any noticeable performance.

What bothers me most about sites that offer these "tweak" guides is that they rarely, if ever, show benchmarks or actual data supporting their claims that doing "x" helps with performance. To me, that invalidates whatever they say.

Now granted, things like turning off System Restore (which has never actually been useful in my experience) or disabling Aero often do give noticeable benefits, shutting down Defender or other security services is just asinine.

In the end though, it is digg, and people know how to milk it for ad revenue

I would never buy Windows Vista. It's unstable, have unnessesary eye-candy, is slower than XP when playing games, eating all memory in your computer, Vista offers 7 different editions, which is not nessesary (Home and Pro is enough).

Any positive with Vista? No.

- IT Pro User, developer, making research and loves MacGyver!

I agree with Lars. Vista is worthless and damn expensive!

Any negative with XP? No.

- Home User, car builder, taxi driver and hates Vista!

You ppl live in the past. XP is 5 years old, the code is OLD.  Granted XP is quicker for somethings, but I haven't noticed any difference when playing games.  You really need DX10 games to notice the full difference.

The support forums are full of posts from people who've been "tweak'n" their OS :)

I'm still amazed at the number of people using registry cleaners thinking that it's speeding up their OS...ever take a look at the quantity of posts at the support forums for the various registry cleaner apps.  One disaster after another.

People screw-up their OS using these tweaks/reg cleaners then when things go worng they blame MS/Vista :)

Ooops...I'm starting to sound like a fanboy here:)

just my 2c worth.