Taming Vista? It's easy, just drive a stake through its fucking heart

The New York Times has a column by Stephen Williams:

Taming Vista on my Intel chip-equipped Sony Vaio laptop became, after a while, a measure of maintaining patience, never mind sanity. Sure, there was a day recently when I could’ve thrown the thing out of the window and into the backyard, and then made tracks to the Mac Pro desktop in the basement. Instead, I turned on a football game. And there was Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates try on shoes in an ad for Vista — I think.
Whatever that was about, the truth is, Vista doesn’t have to be as bad as the competing Apple ads say it is. Here are some ways to make your Vista experience more livable, and perhaps even more lovable.
It’s not just me: Among the features that many users found most annoying early on in Vista’s life cycle was the user account control feature.
The U.A.C. in Vista was to save newbie Web surfers from spyware and viruses that might otherwise install themselves on the hard drive. This is a good thing, of course, as Windows machines attract viruses like candy apples draw flies.
A warning box pops up on the screen every time a program or application is about to be installed: “Windows needs your permission to continue.” The options are to click on “Continue” or “Cancel.”
“Almost every other question I get was how to get rid of the UAC,” said Karl L. Gechlik, a systems administrator in Manhattan. Microsoft now allows you to turn off the U.A.C. permanently if you have a newer version of the operating system or have downloaded the Service Pack 1 release.
Vista is a memory hog. Microsoft says a computer running Vista needs 512 megabytes or more of random access memory. In the real world a gigabyte of RAM is a more realistic minimum. Two gigabytes is better. Mr. Gechlik says his systems have been upgraded to three gigabytes of RAM. “You need twice the memory for Vista that XP needed,” he said. “You need a lot more oomph to do what you want.”
Adding RAM isn’t brain surgery nor is it outrageously expensive, but depending on the computer, installation is best left to an expert. Do-it-yourself types can search Google for “Installing more RAM” — there are plenty of how-to articles and videos available. With a flash memory device — a USB flash drive, CompactFlash, or SD card — of at least 256 megabytes, you can make the PC use data faster. Plugged into a USB port or media reader, the memory device serves as an additional memory cache. (The more memory the better, up to 4 gigabytes.) After the device is inserted, Vista asks you if you want to use it to improve performance. You can choose to allocate part of the card or drive’s memory to what Microsoft calls ReadyBoost and use the remainder to store files. Don’t laugh. This works. And, unlike RAM, you don’t have to mess with the computer’s insides. And because the price of flash memory has dropped drastically — a 2-gigabyte device is only about $25 on sale — it’s a no-brainer. I bet the Mac Guy wishes he had one of these.
You may think you have only the Firefox browser running, but Vista starts a host of programs every time you start it. There is no reason for most of them to be running and using the computer’s memory. So, back to Control Panel. Click Uninstall a Program and in the Tasks pane on the left, click Turn Windows Features On or Off. You should see a checklist of the programs. Most are incomprehensible. What is “Windows DFS Replication Service”? Hover the cursor over each entry and a pop-up box tries to explain what it is. Uncheck the ones you do not need. This does not remove them from your PC; it just turns them off.
If you are really serious about tweaking Vista, you can do more to limit what is running in the background — and there is a surprising amount of activity when you think that all you are doing is playing Solitaire.
This is a bit more intimidating process. The easy part: Click the Start button, type in services.msc and hit Enter. A window pops up with a table of “services” running. And it’s a long list. Look at the entries that are labeled Automatic. These run whether you want them to or not. But which ones are necessary? TweakHound.com is an invaluable site for figuring this out.
To change a service from Automatic to Manual, right-click on the name of the service. Click Properties. Click the Stop button and change Startup Type to Manual.
One virtue of Vista is that it makes your PC’s desktop prettier. But it uses a lot of memory to throw those widgets on the side of the screen and make icons transparent. Yep, go back to Control Panel, this time to Personalization. Disable the transparency feature by removing the checkmark on Enable Transparency. Click the Performance and System Tools tab, and click Adjust Visual Effects. Click Adjust For Best Performance.
The system will also run a little faster if you revert to the classic Windows look instead of the Aero look. The easiest way is to right-click on the desktop, click Personalize and click Windows Color and Appearance. Click Open Classic Appearance Properties, choose a theme in the Color Scheme list box and click O.K.
These tips should help until the next operating system upgrade (tentatively code-named Vienna) comes along, and then all of this will happen all over again.

Rico says he had the real answer right in the first paragraph: "Sure, there was a day recently when I could’ve thrown the thing out of the window and into the backyard, and then made tracks to the Macintosh desktop in the basement."