Also you can use gpedit.msc ( in Business,Enterprise and Ultimate ) to tweak a lot. For instance you can disable te 16bit subsystem, disable the program-compatibility-subsystem, diable the constant timestamp-writing to your harddisk and more.

With lots of work, vista can be made smooth, but you really need a lot of knowledge of what an Windows OS underpinnings are. For the average Joe it is all useless and even risky to try to mess with Vistas “unlocking secrets”..

The OS itself ( or better : the idea behind the OS ) is nice. The implementation is worst.

I’ve found that just turning off all the services and features that involve Vista checking up on itself, things move along a lot faster. Seems that a large part of Vista’s problem is that it’s insecure about itself (rightly so in some cases) and likes to double check itself, which basically makes it do everything twice, making it half as fast! Turn off all these diagnostic services (all the ones with the word “diagnostic” in their name) and you won’t be able to look at the performance logs and find out why Vista is slow, but it’ll run faster. You can also disable other services like the media center extender, uPnP and PnP-X services if you don’t use such devices as network attached speakers and such. Your mileage may vary depending on your computer.

The best thing you can do is to just get as fast a computer as possible with the most RAM and some sort of discrete (ATI or NVIDIA) graphics. The sad thing about Vista is that in order to get it to run well on an average system, you have to disable most of the components that make it any different than XP. Aside from the Tablet and Media Center uses, it’s really not worth the difference.

Registry cleaners are generally worthless and cause more problems than benefit. Your system has to already be too slow to run Vista if you can run a registry cleaner and actually notice a performance difference. The registry uses less than 64MB RAM, which is negligable these days. RegCure is awful, BTW, and is considered by some to be malware:
http://www.emsisoft.com/en/malware/?Adware.Win32.RegCure

CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a good free registry/tempfile cleaner. It is conservative and only appears to delete registry entries that reference non-existent files and registry keys. Really only necessary if you’re getting “file not found” type errors for no apparent reason.

http://www.pc-registry-repair.com/regcure/

Just want to say thank you, next time you are in Bangkok have a beer on me

Cheers

Rudy