playing with windows vista

[terrell]

i've been playing lately on a vista build 5744 machine. i'm able to tweak xp to the point the links swing meter is smooth as glass. but the vista machine has all kinds of stuff going on in the background that make the swing meter a crap shoot. does anyone have any recommendations for turning unnecessary stuff off, or websites with tweaks for vista?

btw, the graphics with vista and my mx4000 were awful. so i picked up a 6200 cheap, and now the graphics are great.

[FDS_Catherine]

T. How much ram do you have in your pc. I noticed that whenever I put another one meg stick in, the performance from Vista was exceptional.

I am nearly sure you should have at least a minimum of 2x1024 sticks of ram in a Vista machine to get it to operate smoothly. ( Probably wrong, but i'm sure i'll get corrected. )

[terrell]

thanks, catherine. i have 1280 mb now. i had 2x256 in it, then i replaced a 256 mb stick with a 1 gb stick. i've been contemplating replacing the other stick, so that's a good idea.

but there is an awful lot of cpu and disk activity even when it's sitting idle. a look at task manager shows most of the activity is coming from any number of svchost.exe processes. and without parsing the pid's, it's hard to tell exactly what it's doing. that's why i'd like to shut down unnecessary services, etc.

i've already shut down user control, but that's not a good idea security-wise. i found a website with user control tweaks, but their suggestions weren't matching my build of vista for whatever reason. with user control turned on, it gets really annoying answering 'yes' three times everytime you click the mouse. (8