Vista 64 Ult - recommended tweaks for first time running?

TheBigCheese · 22 Mar 2009 at 13:23

Hi guys

I'm currently waiting for Vista 64 Ultimate to install for the first time, I've previously installed Home premium 64 for family and that was a swine with the UAC popping up all the time.

I have read on here previously about 'Tweak UAC' a small program to stop it bothering you all the time..

What other tweaks would everyone recommend for a better Vista 64 experience?

Hopefully it we get a big list it will be of use to other Vista users.

Many thanks

reflux · 22 Mar 2009 at 13:24

All I do is disable Windows Defender on startup, disable the firewall, disable UAC and turn security centre's notifications off.

Brian Stuart · 22 Mar 2009 at 15:34

I can understand disabling security center notifications but I do not think is is wise to disable all of Vistas security features unless you use third party ones. I use TweakUAC in quiet mode, Eset Security Suite firewall. As for other "performance" tweaks, most of them do not give any significant improvement.,

Fire Wizard · 22 Mar 2009 at 18:25

You don't really need to tweak Windows Vista. Create a seperate standard user account and install an anti-virus solution such as Aviria, Avast, NOD32 etc and away you go. Though, the only thing I would consider doing is reducing the amount of hard disk space system restore takes up which can be done by opening a command prompt with administrator privileges and copying the following command into it:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=3GB

Give User Account Control a chance before putting it into "Silent Mode". Understand that you will get quite a few prompts when you have first installed Windows Vista since you are going through the initial stage of setting the system up. However, after that, the number of prompts you get should reduce quite significantly.

Ratbag · 22 Mar 2009 at 19:34

reflux said:
All I do is disable Windows Defender on startup, disable the firewall, disable UAC and turn security centre's notifications off.

Same here. Then I install Comodo and Avira.

I fiddle with the indexing settings so that it only indexes the start menu, and switch off system restore [which consumes vast amounts of space and can harbour all sorts of crap]. Instead, I use ERUNT to make periodic backups of the registry.

In general, Vista is less 'tweakable' than previous OS's, it's default config isn't too bad.