Vista Tip: It's Not Easy Being Green And Power Plan Balanced

Ironically I had this in draft form prior to the Live Earth festival but seeing that reminded me to post this tip. So I guess this makes me a little less eco friendly.

One way to speed up your Vista system is to tweak it's Power settings. Now before even considering this you need to be sure of two things. One thing is have your restore points set in case you forget what you have done and the second is avoid messing with Power settings if you are using a Vista based laptop. Most laptop makers preset these settings to extend battery life or keep down the heat output of a system. so jacking with these settings is ill advised for laptops.

But those of you who like to peek under the hood or want to scale back some of those dips in performance that can happen in longer Vista sessions may want to play with the steps below.

1. Access the Start Button now called the Start Orb in Vista
2. Go to Control Panel
3. Choose the System and Maintanence link
4. Now select the Power Options link
5. Find the radial buttons in the middle of this page.
6. Change the option from "Balanced" to "High Performance"
7. Tab once if you want to modify the settings of High Performance, otherwise, close this window

Remember that you only want to play with these settings when you reach a point where you know your Vista install forwards and backwards. That point is generally about 2 weeks to a month down the road. Vista is always adding or subtracting items, resources and services/programs it does or doesn't need. Like Linux the Vista OS can scale up or down to meet the needs of the user or the network. So when you make little changes you might not notice their effect at first. But this tweak is very noticable if you have been using the Balanced Power Plan for awhile.