S'true

As you may know, I use VMware Fusion 2 for running a Vista installation on my Mac for .NET coding. However, as Vista is a performance hog by large numbers, I generally try to disable as much as possible on my virtual machine, making it go at least a little bit faster. This is what I do with a new Vista install.

Host system

In order to make things go a bit faster I try to have at least 1GB of memory on my installs. As always, the more the merrier. I then select the "Optimize for Virtual Machine disk performance" in VMware Fusion settings.

Guest system

I do a number of tweaks on Vista to make everything go as fast as possible. First off, I disable and stop the following services

• Windows Search Indexer
• Theme
• Tablet PC Input Service
• Windows Media Center Extender
• Readyboost

I then make sure I have the worst-looking desktop ever, by selecting the Windows Classic theme in Control Panel -> Personalize -> Theme. After that I turn off the screen saver, I mean, it's not really that usable for a virtual machine.

To minimize everything even more, I turn off almost all nice-looking UI features

• Right-click on the computer, select Properties
• Select Advanced system settings
• Press Settings under Performance
• Select custom visual effects and disable everything except Smooth edges of screen fonts

I then make sure the remote access features aren't turned on:

• Right-click on the computer, select Properties
• Go to the Remote tab
• Uncheck "Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer"
• Select "Don't allow connections to this computer"

Now I have a reasonably performing system on my soon-to-be two years old 2GHz Macbook. Do any of you have any hint of what I should do to get an even faster Vista system?