Delay Vista Activation for a Year

That's 25 fewer characters that you have to type

When you install Vista, you don’t actually need to input a license key. Vista will give you 30 days before requiring the key before throttling down to Restricted mode. But you can extend that eight times with this simple fix, allowing you to make major hardware upgrades without having to reactivate the OS.

This simple registry hack will give you a year of no-license-key operation.

To reset the timer to 30 days, open a command-line window in Administrative mode (see tip on page 40), then type slmgr -rearm. This starts the 30-day countdown anew, no matter how much time is left on your first countdown. You can do this three times (for 120 days total) before it won’t work any more.

You can give yourself another 240 days by making one registry tweak. Type regedit in the Start menu search box and press Enter; then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\SL. In the right pane, right-click SkipRearm and click Modify. Change the 0 to a 1. You should now be able to do the rearm trick above eight more times.
Note: We make no promises that Microsoft won’t patch this behavior before day 360 rolls around.

Fix Nvidia-Specific Performance

Upgrade your GeForce gaming

Running an Nvidia GeForce 6, 7, or 8 series videocard? If you’re seeing abnormally low frame rates or system crashing while gaming (especially noticeable in Battlefield 2142, Half-Life 2, and Rainbow Six Vegas, among other titles), a patch can help considerably. Grab it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105. A similar fix is available for Vista users running SLI rigs at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936710. This hotfix improves (or enables) the use of a secondary graphics card under DirectX 10.

Gaming under Vista might choke with late-model GeForce cards, but a quick download can fix you right up.

Keep Tabs on Vista Via Email

Get instant alerts when something’s amiss

Rather than manually checking the boring old Event Viewer, how about getting Vista to email you when something’s gone wrong? To set up email logging, open the Event Viewer (it’s in the Administrative Tools control panel), open a log, and find an event for which you want to be notified. In the pane on the right, click “Attach Task to This Event...” and walk through the wizard, specifying the server from which email should be sent and the address it should go to. (Be careful with this, you might end up spamming yourself.)

The security log is likely the most useful source for logging via email.

Boost SATA Drive Performance

Enable SATA’s latest high-test features

Risk-takers can get a little hard drive performance boost by turning on two options in Vista that are disabled by default. In Device Manager, find your hard drive (under Disk Drives), right-click it, click Properties, then click the Policies tab. Select “Optimize for performance” and check both “Enable write caching on the disk” and “Enable advanced performance.” Be warned: With the latter two options turned on, you may risk losing data if you lose power or have a catastrophic crash, so make sure you use a universal power supply and run regular backups. The specific performance boost depends on the make and model of your drive; don’t expect the moon.

Vista doesn’t automatically take advantage of some of SATA’s performance features.

Kick Vista Defrag to the Curb

Upgrade your defragger to something less useless

Vista’s disk defragmenter is a giant leap backwards. Run a defrag manually and what you get isn’t the helpful, animated progress window you know from XP, but rather that evil, spinning, blue wheel and the notice “Defragmenting hard disks... This may take from a few minutes to a few hours.” Wow, informative!

Reclaim the visual look at your hard drive's fragmentation with Diskeeper.

To get a better defrag system, you’ll have to install third-party software. Without a doubt, the best is Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier ($100, www.diskeeper.com), which offers an exhaustive collection of defragging options, including file sequencing based on usage patterns, boot-time defragging, and barely noticeable background operation. The $50 Pro (non-Premier) edition is exactly the same, sans the file-sequencing feature.

Next: Fed Up? Downgrade to WinXP