Tweaking Vista to Run on a Laptop

So what's an owner of an older laptop to do? Here are the tips I used while preparing my three-year-old Sony Vaio PCG-V505 for a road trip with Vista Ultimate.

Built for portability rather than power, my four-pound laptop easily supported Windows XP Professional. But after clean-installing Vista, a glance at the Windows Experience Index showed trouble. The laptop's Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB of memory and 40 GB hard disk all earned respectable performance ratings. But the laptop’s meager graphics plummeted the overall score to a dismal 1.0 rating.

Owners of many other lightweight laptops will face the same problem when trying to run Vista. But it’s not too hard to run Vista relatively smoothly after applying these key tweaks.

Sneaking a Windows XP Driver into Windows Vista

Almost all new Vista owners face a search for those rare Vista-compatible drivers. Vista didn't support my laptop's wireless network adapter – a common problem with laptops – so I connected my laptop to the router with a network cable, and hit the Internet.

To its credit, Windows Update automatically poured in several key drivers, resuscitating my touchpad, dial-up modem, and a few other proprietary Sony features. The wireless adapter, however, a stubborn D-Link DWL-650m, remained dead. A trip to D-Link’s Web site proved fruitless, so I turned to the adapter’s old Windows XP driver. Unfortunately, the driver’s installation program kept freezing.

I solved the problem with Vista’s Add Hardware Wizard: Click Start, choose Control Panel, and switch to Classic Mode to see the Add Hardware icon atop the list.

The Add Hardware Wizard, a remnant from Windows XP, lets you point Windows directly to a driver’s location, neatly bypassing an ailing or incompatible installation program. Soon after I pointed the wizard to the driver’s folder, Vista found and installed the driver. The wireless adapter’s lights began to blink, and I could surf wirelessly.

Ditching Aero

Vista’s glowing Aero graphics easily overburden most lightweight laptops. Solve that problem by switching to Windows Classic, instead: Right-click the desktop and choose Personalize; then click Theme, and switch to Windows Classic.

As soon as I switched to the less graphics intensive theme, the laptop’s roaring fan dropped its pitch a few notches. The Windows Classic theme still supports Vista’s sidebar, so dropping Aero’s trappings won’t force you to give up any gadgets you’ve grown to love. But unless your laptop boasts a widescreen display – something lacking on many older laptops – you’ll probably turn off the sidebar anyway to maximize your desktop real estate.

For an even bigger performance boost, dump all of Vista’s visual frills: Right-click the Start menu’s Computer icon, choose Properties, and click Advanced System Settings from the left pane. In the Performance section, click the Settings button and choose Adjust For Best Performance. Click Apply, and the speed boost is obvious: Vista’s neatly trimmed look lets the menus fly rather than crawl across the screen.

If you can’t live without a few frills – you love the thumbnail photo icons in your Pictures folder, for example – choose Custom instead of Adjust For Best Performance. There, you can choose which of Vista’s 20 different visual effects should stay turned on.

Before turning on too many effects, remember that Aero’s a proven battery hog. Think of which you prefer when on the road: good looks or a long battery life.