Web Development Insight

If you have Vista and have upgraded to service pack 1 you can reclaim 1.5 GB of disk space.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 installer will not remove the older versions of Vista files from the hard drive. This is because the older files may be required in case you decide to uninstall SP1 later from the system. It has been reported that this amounts to 1.5 GB of disk space. If you are satisfied with the performance of Windows Vista SP1 and unlikely to remove it later, why not reclaim some disk space by removing all the older Vista files. Note that once this is done SP1 cannot be uninstalled.

It is easy and takes less than a minute. Just open your Windows command prompt and type vsp1cln.exe (short for Vista SP1 Cleaner).

vsp1cln.exe is added to your Windows Vista System folder after you install Vista SP1

This will make Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer. All the older files are deleted now and your hard disk has about 1.5 GB of extra space.

Many people complain that their computer is too slow and it takes a long time to boot up. Startup programs are often the culprit. There are many hidden startup programs that are installed without the user’s knowledge - monitors and schedulers to name a few.
msconfig comes with Windows XP and does a minimal job of showing startup programs. We like autoruns by SysInternals. It is freeware and shows MUCH more than just startup programs: drivers, services, print monitors, browser helper objects…the list goes on. You can hide signed Microsoft entries so only 3rd party items show up. Autoruns makes it easy to disable/enable startup entries. This can also be the bane of autoruns.
Autoruns has a command line mode, too. And it runs on all versions of Windows; 95 on up.

Doug