Make Vista shutdown and boot faster

Vista, like its predecessors will be fast when you first boot it and for a few weeks after but like every other version of Windows will get slow, here are some tips to help curtail that but you will still have to do the occasional reinstall to get all your performance back.
In order to make Vista boot faster, the only thing you can really do at this point is defrag the hard drive. After opening and closing files all the time, these files become spread in fragments all across the hard drive, increasing seek times, defragmenting puts them back into one contiguous spot and some utilities even have options for optimizing boot by placing the boot files and startup programs as close to the start of the drive as possible.
Windows XP users have the option of using BootVis but if you don’t know how to use that tool, don’t, it can really mess up your system if used wrong. Sadly, it does not run under Vista which is a real shame because it’s an awesome utility and really does something to improve XP boot times. Used with TuneXP (also not compatible with Vista) it’s a lethal combination for shortening boot times.
Word on the street has it that using this manual defrag command “defrag c: -b” at the command prompt, where c: is your primary boot drive, will defrag the boot files and move them so Vista will start faster. The problem with this method is there is no progress bar so you just have to sit and wait for it to finish. People wonder why I don’t like command line and command line tools, this is one of those reasons, basically I always need to know when/how soon something will finish or at least get a rough estimate from a progress bar.
The built-in defrag utility of Vista is just as lame as the command line version, it will only notify you when it is complete. My favorite paid options for a defrag utility are Perfect Disk and Diskeeper but if you can’t/don’t want to pay for one then it’s hard to be Auslogics Disk Defrag which is compatible with Windows 2000, 2003, XP and Vista.
Even if defragging doesn’t really help your boot performance (this will vary) it will still help improve application load times when the operating system is finally booted up.
That covers booting but there is one quick edit to the registry that can make Vista shut down quicker than you can say “shut down.” Those not comfortable with delving in to the registry had better not proceed because making a mistake here could (and usually does) mess up your system bad.
At the Start Menu, type “regedit” without the quotes in the search box and hit Enter. Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control and go to the Control folder, right click the entry “WaitToKillServiceTimeout” and set the value to something lower, 1000 is usually good (the numbers represent milliseconds). The default value is a (too) generous 20000. However, the cost with this is that it won’t give running programs much time to save data so losing work using the tweak is a definite possibility.
There are some more tweaks that can be found right here but many of them (save for the one above) can be done automatically by the free version of TweakVI.
I just want to say again that it’s a shame that BootVis and TuneXP don’t run on Vista because these were the two best tools for improving performance in XP.