Tweaking Vista for Performance

As compared to XP, a lot offeaturesin Vista require a little more effort
before they can be accessed. For eg, if you want to change the screen
reso-lution, you need an extra mouse click on the 'Personalization' option.
Startdockprovides you with a user friendly tool called 'Tweak Vista' that can be
used by both novices and experts. Using this tool you can configure Vista
security in a few easy-to-understand steps. It provides four dif-ferent options
to configure your system for optimum Internet connectivity, depending on whether
it's a low-end or a high-end machine. Then there's a SMARTGuardutility that
automatically monitors, ana-lyzes and provides reports on the perform-ance of
your system. Unlike other tools, it automatically prompts you about system
enhancements to keep your system run-ning smoothly. Let's take a look at some of
the interesting tweaks that can be done.

The 'Services' utility lets you optimize your system for playing games, running office applications. It even lets you optimize Vista to be used as a server	Unlike Task Manager, this utility gives a very comprehensive view of resources used by applications, which includes the amount of RAM, CPU and other resources being used

Using the in-built Vista assessment utility, you can compare your system's performance with that of other systems using Tweak Vista on the network	You can calculate the amount of power consumed by each component on your computer in a year. You even get detailed statistics for each processing core in your system