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 convention. Since this convention hasn’t been used since the early versions of Windows, the majority of users no longer need to retain this backward-compatibility.
If you aren’t running any older software titles, you can likely give a little boost to your file access times by disabling Vista’s backward-compatibility with the 8.3 convention. Disabling this feature is relatively easy and is done by making a small change to the Windows registry.
- Click on the start menu open the Registry Editor by typing “Regedit” and pressing enter
- Browse through the registry editor and find the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
- Select the key and double-click on the NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation setting
- Change the setting value from 0 to 1
- Click OK and restart
That’s all there is to it. If you find out that this change affects any of the software that you are running, you can just as easily re-enable the setting in the future.
Leave Your Comments Below