How to speed up Vista?

[Manicm]

Having finally a few weeks ago managed to restore my laptop, its just so slow especially the spec it has, 3gb RAM and a hefty dual core processor and its still stupidly slow!

Im going to ditch Nortons as im sure thats the root course of some evil, which Antivirus doesn't kill the computer dead these days??

Any other hints or tips to speed the things up? once it gets going its fine, but takes about 20mins to boot everything up

I prefer my Apple mac, but its on its last legs really is dying now

[spatular]

i don't use vista much so not sure if it has the same thing as xp - start -> run -> "msconfig" -> ok. that lets you disable some stuff on startup - some things can obviously be removed from startup, like quicktime or ms office stuff i guess but other stuff you should probably check its ok to disable it - google helps here.

having said that my work pc has a similar problem and i seem incapable of sorting it out

[Manicm]

When i ran windows7 it was really quick, but after a diaster with that, i haven't been able to buy a new ver7 yet so vista is the only OS on it, will try the msconfig see if that can help speed it up, then i need the time to transfer all my stuff from my mac to my pc.

Anti-virus software anyone?? are the free one's any good??

[spatular]

i used to use avast, now use microsoft security essentials, both seem to work ok, and both free.

[retroed]

I also use Microsoft Security Essentials, and I run an Avira virus scan every now and then. Both are good, and not resource heavy.

CCleaner is good for clearing out crap.

[Manicm]

Cheers guys, seems a fair bit quicker now. Now to find some free games to play on it now!

[Cyberpunk]

After Service Pack 2, Vista wasn't too bad, but you can still get more power out of it. Try things like disabling the search indexing, stopping certain programs starting with the pc, such as Windows Live Messenger, and the like. Also, you can reduce your pagefile/virtual memory, as you have plenty of Ram. Some people with 3 gig, even turn off the virtual memory. Let me know if you want to know how to do the above.