A while ago I upgraded to windows Vista, I think I'm one of the few who actually really like this operating system. Like anything tho, out the box there are some issue with it, but with a few simple tweaks you can increase its performance and responsiveness no end.

So here is a top ten run down of some of the best Vista tweaks I've found:

1. Turn off Windows Search Indexing

Windows Vista search indexing is constantly reviewing files on your system to make their contents available for quick searching. This is handy, but can severely impact system performance.

To disable constant indexing:

• Click Start then Computer
• Right Click the C: Drive
• On General Tab, Uncheck Index this drive for faster searching
• On the subsequent dialog box, Select Include subfolders and files

2. Turn off Remote Differential Compression

Remote Differential Compression measures the changes in files over a network to transfer them with minimal bandwidth rather than transferring an entire file that has previously been moved. By constantly checking for file changes, this service can hinder system performance.

To disable this service:

• Open Control Panel
• Switch to Classic View
• Select Program Features
• Choose Turn Windows features on and off
• Scroll down and uncheck Remote Differential Compression

3. Turn off Automatic Windows Defender Operation

Windows Defender real-time protection against malware continues to run despite having Automatic operation disabled.

To disable this feature:

• Open Control Panel
• Select Windows Defender
• Choose Tools from the top menu
• Select Options
• Uncheck Auto Start at the bottom of the window

4. Turn off Automatic Disk Defragmentation

Windows Vista and its always-on defragment feature isn't really that necessary and can cause system slow down. Just remember to run a defrag manually every week or so.

To disable this:

• Click Start then Computer
• Right Click the C: Drive
• Click on Properties
• Select the Tools Tab
• Click on Defragment Now
• Uncheck Run on a schedule

5. Add a 2GB or higher USB Flash drive to take advantage of Windows Ready Boost (Additional Memory Cache)

Ready Boost is Microsoft's name for using a USB thumb/flash drive to provide some quick access memory the operating system can use as extra RAM. The Ready Boost system can significantly improve system performance.

To set this up:

• Insert a USB Flash Drive
• Click Start then Computer
• Right Click the USB Drive in My Computer
• Select the Ready Boost Tab
• Choose Use this device
• Select as much space as you can free up for RAM usage vs. Storage

6. Turn off Windows Hibernation

Windows hibernation background services can use a large amount of system resources. If you don't use the Hibernate feature on a regular basis you may want to disable it to give Vista a performance boost.

To disable Hibernation:

• Select the Control Panel then Power Options
• Click Change Plan Settings
• Click on Change Advanced Power Settings
• Expand the Sleep selection
• Expand the Hibernate After selection
• Crank the selector down to zero
• Click Apply

7. Turn off System Restore

Analysis and restore point creation by Windows Vista can eat a fair amount of system resources. Disabling this service will obviously mean the system restore feature in Vista will not be available in the event of a system crash. Change this at your own risk.

To disable this service:

• Control Panel>System
• Click System Protection on the left panel
• Uncheck the main system drive
• Agree to the confirmation

8. Disable User Access Control (UAC)

This much-loathed new Vista feature attempts to protect your system from malware infection by making you manually confirm a whole host of everyday user operations. While it doesn't directly impact performance, it can be annoying and might be more hassle than good.

To disable User Access Control:

• Click Start then Control Panel
• Select User Accounts
• Select Turn User Account Control on or off
• Uncheck User Account Control Box
• Restart as recommended

9. Disable excess Windows Services that Auto-Launch at Startup

Just like Windows XP, Vista ships with all kinds of services enabled that load at startup and may never be used by most users.

To see what loads at startup and disable the ones you likely won't be needing (they can always be started manually later):

• Click Start then Control Panel
• Select Administrative Tools
• Choose System Configuration
• Click the Services Tab
• You can safely deselect:
  • Offline Files (unless you're using Offline File Sync)
  • Tablet PC Input Service (unless you have a tablet PC)
  • Terminal Services
  • Windows Search (If you have already disabled indexing)
  • Fax (unless you're using a fax modem)

10. Disable Excess Windows Features

Windows ships with other features that are listed separately in the Vista operating system from the startup services.

You can view and disable these features by:

• Clicking Start then Control Panel
• Select Program Features
• On the left panel, select Turn Windows Features on or off
• You can safely deselect:
  • Indexing Service
  • Remote Differential Compression
  • Tablet PC Optional Components
  • Windows DFS Replication Service
  • Windows Fax & Scan (unless you use a modem for faxing)
  • Windows Meeting Space (unless you use the Live Meeting Service)

Today I discovered that a friends better half has just released her first book! Congratulations to Claire Lawrie, who has managed to write, illustrate and find distributors for her first published book!

This is even more impressive when you consider that her husband (Dan) accidentally formatted their PC and erased all of their precious digital memories.

The Adventures Of Pongy Pond tells the tale of Brook the goldfish.

You can buy it here: Amazon link

www.360voice.com hosts a service where you can interrogate your GamerTag through an XML web feed. They host the service themselves, but also provide an API so that you can remotely call it, and use it however you want. So I thought I'd consume their service using ColdFusion, translate it, and display it here. Firstly I want to try and reduce the service overhead. So I will call the 360 voice service on the first instance of page initialisation, and then write the result to a file. The service only updates once a day, so I can safely assume that caching it daily isn't going to be too out of date. Firstly I've setup some global variables to set the file path location. Then check for the existence of a file with todays date as the name. If the file exists, read it and use it, otherwise make a cfhttp call to the url, passing in any of the filtering url variables that the 360 voice API documents, in this case just my gamer tag. In the code above I am also using two cfhttpparams to deflate the return response from the service, as I was having issue with this in a compressed format. (Read more here). Now that we have the content and we've parsed it out into an XML object we need to search through and pick out the elements we want. First we write out the header details from the parent node of the xml document. Create an Array, and map the contents to the child node you want. In this case the "api.info" node. Doing this allows you to treat the previous XML object as a standard Array, so we can loop over it, and pick out the elements we want. Now we will do much the same thing with the blog contents, but using a different XML child Node for the Array. Again just loop through the Array, picking out the elements you want. Next I will add pagination, and possible look at some of the other data that 360 voice stores in its API, such as gamer badges etc.... but that's another article.