If you are new to editing your Registry you may want to back it up first as a precaution, before making any changes to your Registry. Thankfully this is very easy to do in Vista.

How to Backup Your Registry

1. To back up the Registry Click Start , type systempropertiesprotection in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow.
2. Wait for Windows to search for available disks and most recent restore points.
3. In the System Properties dialog box (See Fig 1.0), on the System Protection tab, click Create, Type a name for the restore point and then click Create.
4. After the restore point has been created successfully, click OK two times.
5. Note If System Restore is turned off, click to select the local disk, click Apply and then click Create.

Fig 1.0 System Properties Protection Window

How to Restore your Registry

1. Click Start, type systempropertiesprotection in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, on the System Protection tab, click System Restore, In the System Restore dialog box select Choose a different restore point, and then click Next Select the restore point that you want to use, and then click Next.
3. Confirm your restore point, and then click Finish System restore restores the selected Windows Vista configuration and then restarts the computer. Log on to the computer.
4. When the System Restore confirmation page appears, click OK..

Defrag your Boot Files

You can make your system boot up faster by placing all your boot files close to one another. This may be set by default, but it doesn't hurt to doble check.

Do the following:

1. Type REGEDIT at the Start Search box or in a DOS console window.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction (See Figure 2.0).
3. Set the Enable value to to Y.
4. Restart your machine.

Fig 2.0 Defrag your Boot Files

Do not let Windows clear out your paging file while shutting down

This the pagefile.sys which stores temporary files, data, and possibly unencrypted passwords.So unless security is high concern, you want to keep it because it can speed up windows shutdown time.

To make sure your pagefile.sys is not cleared out by windows do the following:

1. Type REGEDIT at the Start Search box or in a DOS console window.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management (See Figure 3.0).
3. Set ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0.
4. Restart your machine.

Fig 3.0 Do Not Clear Out Your Paging File While Shutting Down.

Tip: You can avoid shutdown and startup by going into hibernate mode, unless you don't want to have our machine stay on standby power.

Decrease the amount of time windows waits for a service to shutdown

If you have a long running service windows may sometimes wait up to 20 seconds to see if the service will shutdown before prompting you to shut it down.

To set the value lower do the following:

1. Type REGEDIT at the Start Search box or in a DOS console window.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control.
3. Set WaitToKillServiceTimeout to a value lower than 20000 (20,000 ms) by 5 s increments. (See Figure 4.0)
4. Restart your machine.

Tip: Do not go lower than 5 s because you might lose data froma running program

Fig 4.0 Decrease the amount of time windows waits for a service to shutdown.

Clean Up Your Registry