Well recently I had some real performance problems. Vista was running fine for a long time, but then I realized that my computer was getting slower and slower.  What can you do if you experience the same problems?

First of all open your task manager (Strg+Alt+Del) and find out which process is consuming a lot of CPU and RAM.  In my case the Explorer was consuming a lot of CPU resources and I was idling, not doing anything at all. After doing some research I found out that this is due to a recent Vista Update.

Here is the solution:

1. Right-click on your taskbar and select “Properties”

2. Now open the tab “Start Menu” as seen on the screenshot below.

The Start Menu Properties

3. Click on “Customize” to open the advanced settings of the Start Menu.

4. Scroll down until you find the following entry:

Start Menu Search Files

5. Make sure that you check “Dont’ search for files”.

6. Done, now your explorer won’t be eating up all the CPU resources.

Should there be any other process consuming a lot of resources, simply try to identify the source. By the way I recommend to read the post “Tweaking the Windows Task Manager” in order to display the path to each process. That’s a good way to find viruses and trojans as well, should there be a Windows process not inside the Windows folder, then it’s most likely a virus.