Further to my article about tweaking Windows Vista, there are some additional steps that you can follow to further optimize and tune your system.
Vista includes some great enhancements no doubt. Aero is the desktop graphics feature that offers a smooth glassy like desktop theme. It looks great, and conversely, takes a whole lot of resources. Vista also includes a desktop sidebar that holds smalls applications or widgets. Some examples of widgets are a desktop clock, a weather tracker, a RSS newsreader, and desktop picture viewer.
The first step is optimizing your system is to disable the eye candy and useless features and applications. Say bye bye to Aero Glass. Then, analyze the system tray for programs that are eating up precious memory. The system tray is on the bottom right corner of the computer. It holds commonly used programs and utilities, such as the clock, anti virus and anti spyware utilities, and many other hidden programs. Most of the time, these hidden programs are installed silently and in conjunction with new programs that you install. To see what is running in the system tray you can use one of the built in programs within windows called msconfig (click start, run, type msconfig, press enter) or you may use 3rd party solutions such as TuneUp Utilities. Once you have pruned the system tray, look at the start up folder (start\programs\startup) and delete those programs as you see fit.