How do i make Vista run quicker?

[Grael]

Ok im quite new to vista and i have the business version on my new laptop from uni, it was brought for me cause im special
Its a toshiba satellite pro and its OK.
2 gig ram, duo core running at 2.26 each and onbroad graphics (ew i know).

Anyway it came with SO much crap running from start up i disabled pretty much everything, including that aero crap!
But half my ram is still being take up and 25% of the CPU!
And the problem i have now since i disabled most things whenever i run word( which is what i want the pc for really) it crashes all the time! Its so annoying!

Any tips other than sticking XP on here? Problem is there is a lot of specialist software on here and its all paid for and i dont wanna stick a dodgy version of XP over a proper version of vista!

[coldintheshower]

If you've got rid of Aero make sure you've also disabled dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) its pretty much responsible for the graphics effects of Vista.

Disable the sidebar as the widgets on there really hog your memory.

Disable the Indexing Service. Click start there is a search bar underneath where it says all programs.
Type in Index Options. Once its loaded click on the modify button. And then on the Show All Locations Buttons. Then just uncheck folders which you do not want to be indexed.

Disable some startup services. You can do this by clicking Start -> Run and typing in msconfig. Then when the System Configuration shows up hit startup tab and disable the services you do not want/need.
You can also disable services that you do not want to run by clicking on the services tab and unchecking those which you do not need.

Other than that -> defragment your computer regularly and keep your harddrive clean.

[Puratech]

Vista basically just does things when its idle. It loads things into memory, things like aero use a fair bit of resources and this gets Vista a really bad name for being greedy. When you run a big app though it reclaims that memory and runs fine. Its not perfect or as light as previous OS, but its a lot better than people give it credit for, simply for making use of unused memory/cpu time.

[Harv]

vista will reort a huge chunk of memory being used regardless of whats running just optomise your apps as it can use upto half of any ram i your pc just while idle.

[teflon]

Disable UAC, type 'msconfig' into the start bar thing and click the tools tab, scroll down and use disable UAC.
Also if you go to clean up disk on the properties of your main HDD you can delete the hibernation rubbish.

There are quite a few services you can disable if you do a google search on 'speed up vista' but I can't remember them off the top of my head.
In truth, they might help a bit but not a huge amount and if your hardware is slow then it's not suddenly going to become super-fast.
I much prefer Vista but my computer is fairly recent.

[Grael]

Well its all brand new, the laptop costs around 700 quid retail so its not bad! its just not great!
Ill those things thanks guys! Hopefully word will stop crashing too!