If you are looking for an easy way to open files more quickly in Vista, here is one quicky adjustment that you can make. Anytime a file is opened on an NTFS partition, a date stamp is updated to show the last time that the file was accessed. This is in addition to the “last [...]

The vast majority of PC’s running Windows Vista have their hard drives partitioned using the newer NTFS format rather than the older and less efficient FAT32. Expecting that some users would still need to be able to run older 16-bit software from the DOS-era, Microsoft built Vista with support for the old DOS 8.3 file-name [...]

If you’ve use a USB hard drive in the past, you know that reading/writing files to/from an external drive is much slower than performing the same task on your internal hard drive. Because of the connection speed difference between a USB port and your internal IDE connection, this is always going to be the case [...]

One of the nice, new features of Windows Vista is its ability to adjust your network settings to optimize your connection speed without any input on your part. Generally speaking, this feature has done a great job of improving the speed of network connections for many Vista users. There is one group of users, however, [...]

One of the new features that Microsoft added to Windows Vista is ReadyBoost. The idea behind ReadyBoost is to improve your computer’s performance by providing more high-speed memory for applications to use. If your PC doesn’t have enough RAM installed, it will often have to kick applications out of the high-speed physical RAM and into [...]

If you’ve ever had to search  for a file in Windows Vista, you have probably benefited from its built-in indexing service. By default, Windows is set up to index all of the files on your computer including those in your start menu, user profile folders, and any files that you have set up to be [...]