Install SP1. If you can’t install SP1 it means you have one of 13 or so drivers that are so badly written that it’s not worth doing anything else to the system until you get rid of them. Of course Microsoft doesn’t want to come out and point the finger at companies like Dell or NVIDIA, so you’re going to have to figure out which drivers to try updating or replacing, or you could try installing from a Vista image that includes SP1 which works on some systems that can’t handle the update. And if you are not able to fix it out your self you approach Microsoft Certified Technical Support
Give it a couple of days. Whether you’re installing Vista or SP1, the system has to watch what applications you like to load to make SuperFetch work properly – this arranges files and pre-loads them to make application and file loading seem faster. Vista isn’t born psychic; like a fake medium it has to gather clues before it can impress you with its prescience. Also, leave the machine on overnight to let the search indexer wade through your email and hard drive. Indexing backs off when you’re busy so it won’t slow things down, but you won’t get the instant access to your information that makes for the biggest productivity improvement in Vista until the index is done.
Plug in a ReadyBoost stick. Flash is getting cheap enough that a 4GB or 8GB USB stick or SD card won’t break the bank and it speeds Vista up as well as saving battery on a notebooks (flash is faster than hard disk for virtual memory and uses less power). And SP1 fixes what was more a matter of trust than a bug; when your PC comes out of hibernation SP1 now assumes that if your ReadyBoost stick is there it’s the same one you had in before and uses it straight away, rather than throwing away all the information on it and then putting it all back, just when your PC is busy un-hibernating and you’re busy waiting impatiently. If you don’t use ReadyBoost, HIBERFIL.SYS is arranged more logically so it’s faster to read back into memory anyway.
Check your drivers, BIOS and apps. In lab conditions, boot and un-hibernate times for SP1 have gone from 30 seconds to 17 seconds; anything longer than that and you’re waiting for something other than the OS.
Check for managed code apps. Managed code has a lot of advantages, and managed code apps that are coded correctly will notice shutdown events and shut down like any other program. Only it turns out that about 90% of all the managed code apps Microsoft looked at weren’t coded correctly and didn’t shut down. SP1 addresses this, but if it’s a line of business app you should get the code fixed as well.
Install Windows Server 2008. Copying files on your Vista machine will feel much faster in SP1 because the copy is now cached: instead of writing the file straight to disk, Microsoft Windows Vista tucks it into memory and tells you it’s done, then sneaks it onto the hard drive in the background. The overall copy takes about as long, but you don’t notice it as much and the estimate of how long it will take is much more accurate.
Don’t run the photo screensaver. This has been rewritten in SP1 not to steal all the memory on your system, so waking your machine up no longer requires a context switch to get your applications back into memory, but a blank screen uses less power anyway.
Update – or avoid – the CPU Meter in the Sidebar. This little tool for measuring performance was, well, introducing performance issues (and the way the Sidebar clock managed the CPU was eating battery). There’s a new version but there are also much more powerful alternatives. Hide the irrelevant apps and threads and manipulate the data to see what’s at fault, whether it’s an app, a driver, group policy being applied or even faulty hardware.
