A close friend of mine who does dj work brought me his new toshiba laptop with the dreaded OS. He's used to me setting up a streamlined power user XP for him, we took his last laptop and reloaded xp w/o all the crud that comes installed on them.

It's critical that this new computer with 2 to 3 times the horsepower work as good or better than his old xp one.

I have found a few of the old xp tweaks working, looks like it will take a month of sundays just to uninstall the trials and crud.

Are there any good guides avalable?

I don't mind something a little dangerous as I am thinking about using the restore disks anyway since it was a floor model for a little while.

I haven't found a good tweak guide for Vista - but the same tricks that work for XP should work for Vista. Try vLite to streamline the installation, then use a bit of research at Black Viper to customize the services and it should run just fine.

Don't try SP1 until you've got it up and running (and have an image made). I've heard of a few reboot issues (not with Toshiba's) that SP1 has caused.

Sending a PM your way....

The optimizations would be basically those for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), eg:

http://www.audioforums.com/windows-vista-optimization.php

I'll be the rest of the night just removing the crud? It was a floor model since last fall, compusa had it marked down to below half price(500$ out the door)

got a hd combo drive



had 2 or 3 protection suites running

floor techs

thanks guys and wish me luck

tosh satellite 205-S6347

I am to the point where I am ready to mess with system restore, I couldn't find any options for limiting it's size.

This 200 gig drive is going to be pressed for space and I would like to create a data partition. The othre option is to disable restore but I am reluctant to do that.

The guide here does not mention the ability to limit restore points in size?

Vista has gone overboard, after culling crud and disk cleanup, I still couldn't find 28 gigs, programs and system, no data are down to 12 gigs, the 28 gigs were restore points

looks like the only limit is by downsizing the system partition, this a big screwup by Microsoft?

defrag took forever

Seems you have to use the evil sounding Volume Shadow Copy Administrative Command-Line Tool:

http://lifehacker.com/software/windows-vis...sage-254365.php

hi Chewy,,,,, this make's a change,,,, me helping you,,,lol,,,,, you can reduce the amount of disc space allocated to sys restor, my 350gig hdd used 45gig for sys restor so i changed it to 20gig & all is fine,,,, take a look at this link,,, also use the Black Viper's site as John surgested to stop unneeeded services running on auto,,,, i would also stop win defender form running as its usless and is always contacting back to microsoft in the background,,,,,, good luck

http://www.vista4beginners.com/System-Restore-Space-Used

gosh, more homework

afaik know vista home premium doesn't support volume shadow copy??????

I do need to limit the durn thing or turn it off, my goal is a system partition of 40-50 gigs, like me my friend does some video work and a lot of programs want 10 gigs free on the system drive(super for one), once he sees how a core 2 duo tears them up compared to a P4 3Ghz(his desktop).

My areas of expertiese are very limited as you can see, I will not even ever try Linux, too old, too many brain cells gone.



that was one of the first tasks I did, tried to uninstall it, didn't realize it was part of the OS

I can assure you there is no ability to limit restore points when using this option. I think it's a gamble at this time to create data partions either. I have found much with vista unpredictable, as fascinating as it is. I CAN say this: I have rolled the dice twice just to see how stable the system restore option is, and has worked solidly. Just be sure to go straight back and turn system restore back on after the re-boot. Your 200gig drive problem will shock you! Just be patient, and wait for more restore points.

I shrank the system partition twice, first to 45 gigs and then later to 35 gigs, I used the command to set the limit to 4 or 5 gigs?

Either way with hibernate and a couple of other features turned off that's about as small as I could get vista and still leave him some restore points and a 10+ gigs free space in case he does some exotic video conversion

that partition resizing is a great feature but I suspect it's best done at the very beginning