anyone doing so? i'm picking up vista next week and i want to know if there's anything out of the ordinary i have to watch for. xp is already installed and i'm installing vista on a second hdd. i'm using paul thurrott's tutoial here --->http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_install_04.asp

Well, I am dual booting Ubuntu and Vista...if that helps...

This should be all you need to boost and tweak vista nicely http://www.totalidea.com/content/tweakvi/tweakvi-index.html...

Also remember to go to policy's on your hard drive (right click properties) and set advance disk performance for a special boost.

And yeah that's pretty much it... if you have a nvidia card go to there sites they have some hot fixes released by Microsoft that you don't get through live update... and good luck... I hope you like Vista as much as I do.

That is almost certainly a horrible idea unless he has a UPS and can guarantee proper shutdown all the time.

I've had my computer shut down due to a power out with this enabled and it had no problem...

How many times? Once? Just because it was fine one time doesn't make it a good idea.

It would also depend on disk usage at the time, writing specifically.

I find it amusing that one with the nickname "Apt-Get" is recommending Vista.

I'm running Ubuntu in the VM Ware all the time I just avoided a dual boot by installing vista in the background and bring up a guest OS.

I use vmware at work (they paid for it). At home, I started using virtualbox, which is reasonably okay. There are some bugs which make some things annoying, but right now I'm posting this from a firefox inside windows2000 inside my Debian installation (which is what I use all the time).

Is virtual box free?

I would love to go "legit" with my computer software but I have yet to find a good virtual machine... other than VMware...

Way to vastly overexaggerate. Is there risk? Yes. But if your power goes out while the drive is writing, whether that option is on or not, there's a chance it'll corrupt that data. All that option does is increase the amount of data that might be lost in such a case.

The option causes windows to make writes only to the hard drive's cache, which the drive will then write to disk at the next possible opportunity. Thus, if the power goes out, you will lose data in that cache as well as whatever it may be writing.

Of course, it should also be noted that the chances of something really getting fouled up by these are rather insignificant for your average desktop. Laptops? I'd turn it off. Batteries die all the time. USB devices? Definitely disable.

I've had this option on for over 8 months now, through multiple power outages and have yet to lose a single file or experience corruption.

As for Vista in general:

A. Most all "tweaks" are useless or eliminate incredibly useful features. People always insist on turning off the Indexing service, while I found that after a couple days of indexing (I let it index ALL my drives) it calmed down and now uses almost no resources. And it provides an incredibly nice benefit (instant searching).
B. Vista uses a lot of RAM for caching. Don't freak out it's supposed to do this.
C. Get the latest drivers for all your stuff. Very important.

Otherwise I highly recommend it. I really like it.

I wouldn't turn off the indexing service either, but Vista doesn't cache all the RAM on larger RAM computers so you can increase how much vista caches, cached memory speeds up the system... so you'd want vista to cache most of it...

VirtualBox is free and it is quite good. I use it often.


I wouldn't touch Vista myself until after service pack 1, and even then I would put it off for as long as I can.

There are some annoying installation issues with windows2000 & virtualbox (installing win2k as a guest operating system) - There is a note in the usermanual on how to get around it, so it's working okay now. It has been relatively trouble-free since adding their workaround. I have had a few random crashes of win2k (inside virtualbox), but it's not clear whether it's windows fault or virtualbox's fault. Yes, it's free to use (not completely open source, but apparently a lot of it is).

Oh, any time I "pause" the virtual machine or take a snapshot (which pauses it behind-the-scenes), my networking fails inside the guest OS and I have to reboot the guest OS. There may be an easier way.

Yes. Just think of it this way...if clicking a few checkboxes made your system so much faster, why aren't they enabled by default? The answer? Because they don't actually help.

TweakVI has an option called like "increase priority of CMOS realtime click to improve overall performance." There is no gain by checking this option, all it does is **** up your system clock so that you have to resynchronize it like every hour.

Most tweak programs and options are made by people that have no idea what they are doing. They find stuff in MSDN and whatnot that sounds like it could be related to performance and add a checkbox to toggle its registry value.

I like Vista. :/

Or, it does help, they just don't want people complaining about it and not all drives/IDE controllers support it.

If it doesn't actually help why would they have a checkbox for it? The answer? Because it does help.



I totally agree about these "tweak" programs and scripts, but as far as the hard drive performance thing mentioned above, this is an option provided IN windows by default without any registry nonsense.

No no, I'm talking about the majority of speed and performance tweaks found in thinks like TweakVI.

The only reason I use TweakVI is to disable shortcut overlays and other minor interface tweaks. As soon as I install it I remove most of the performance tweaks.