Reducing Vista System Usage for Tablets

[ryandamartini]

With the increased quality of handwriting recognition and other tablet features, Vista is becoming more popular with the tablet crowd. I have vlite and my vista cd and am wondering what would be some good starting points to knock down the load on system resources? Many tablet users want the abilities Vista brings but most tablets are not powerhouses to run Vista and office / productivity tasks smoothly. My goal is to create an ISO me and some colleagues can use.

I used nlite WAY back in the day when Xp first came out to reduce it for some of the older machines, [330mhz emachine] which is still running that nlite version today!

I do have to say I am not familiar with Vista and what the OS does to tax RAM and CPU so much.

Any help will be appreciated in this project.

Thank You,

Ryan M

[bmhome1]

I'm running v'Lited Home Premium on my Motion M1300 1Gz, which is THE minimum to even install Vista. It runs VERY well by also having MAXED RAM (in my case, luckily finding out 2GB works fully) AND a Hitachi 7200rpm drive along with v'Lite benefits. My uptime has been 210 days without single issue and all updates fully installed. SP1 may be issue, but I doubt having been quite conservative chopping down Vista. The base install was under 6GB from 1.5GB DVD file. I long ago lost the configuration file, but even have repaired from DVD when upgrading to 100GB hard drive recently.

Just trim away the obvious baggage based on bloat and what a tablet never could use, such as Moviemaker. Keep ALL the small stuff that might have hidden interdependencies just to save 10MB. The GUI will guide with common sense and warnings of consequences to pay ATTENTION to. Otherwise, you will be fine and thrilled with tablet benefits.

My current Vista is 17GB with 140 applications, including 3GB page and 2GB hibernation. ALL data is on separate partition, so ENTIRE install is all software, including: StarryNight Pro and it's 1.5GB database, Photoshop CS2 and CS3, Office XP suite with OneNote 2003 (Office 2007 is pig on old tablets) and every software imaginable. There is absolutely NOTHING for me that XP does better or Vista can't be made working. That includes 1999 peripherals and their software installed with compatibility modes options and common sense.

I suggest making Vista partition at LEAST 30GB and keep smaller XP partition as fall-back. I have had ZERO driver issues letting Vista FULLY auto-install all drivers. Only external displays on the ancient 855 chip remain broken in Vista and force rebooting back into XP for (my rare) needs.

Fine-tune away ALL backround processes that cause hard drive activity including indexing, defrag and anything else. Buy PerfectDisk and defrag manually frequently, even 5-10% affects Vista performance on low-end tech specs tablets.

I could elaborate more details if interested.

Edited October 25, 2007 by bmhome1

[ryandamartini]

I'm running v'Lited Home Premium on my Motion M1300 1Gz, which is THE minimum to even install Vista. It runs VERY well by also having MAXED RAM (in my case, luckily finding out 2GB works fully) AND a Hitachi 7200rpm drive along with v'Lite benefits. My uptime has been 210 days without single issue and all updates fully installed. SP1 may be issue, but I doubt having been quite conservative chopping down Vista. The base install was under 6GB from 1.5GB DVD file. I long ago lost the configuration file, but even have repaired from DVD when upgrading to 100GB hard drive recently.

Just trim away the obvious baggage based on bloat and what a tablet never could use, such as Moviemaker. Keep ALL the small stuff that might have hidden interdependencies just to save 10MB. The GUI will guide with common sense and warnings of consequences to pay ATTENTION to. Otherwise, you will be fine and thrilled with tablet benefits.

My current Vista is 17GB with 140 applications, including 3GB page and 2GB hibernation. ALL data is on separate partition, so ENTIRE install is all software, including: StarryNight Pro and it's 1.5GB database, Photoshop CS2 and CS3, Office XP suite with OneNote 2003 (Office 2007 is pig on old tablets) and every software imaginable. There is absolutely NOTHING for me that XP does better or Vista can't be made working. That includes 1999 peripherals and their software installed with compatibility modes options and common sense.

I suggest making Vista partition at LEAST 30GB and keep smaller XP partition as fall-back. I have had ZERO driver issues letting Vista FULLY auto-install all drivers. Only external displays on the ancient 855 chip remain broken in Vista and force rebooting back into XP for (my rare) needs.

Fine-tune away ALL backround processes that cause hard drive activity including indexing, defrag and anything else. Buy PerfectDisk and defrag manually frequently, even 5-10% affects Vista performance on low-end tech specs tablets.

I could elaborate more details if interested.

Please keep on elaborating!

[bmhome1]

What tablet models/specs are you planning deploying? The very newest tablets such as HP2710 or Lenovo X61 run Vista very well out of the box. The older the specs, the greater the need for compensating CPU with full RAM and high-speed drives and vLite along with tweaks of endless depth, again necessity based on the low-end, the greater the challenge. Specific feedback helps narrow focus.

[bmhome1]

Here's solid resource for Vista on legacy era tablets still popular with details on issues:

http://mobilepcwiki.org/mpc/index.php?titl...ta_Installation