soldier1st

well not always from ram but i would check your addons/extensions as i would look at that first as explorer is picky on certain addons/extensions so use process explorer and see the dll's being loaded into explorer and if there is something suspicious looking then that could be the problem.

use the adobe flash remover to remove all of the flash player(use google), also you should not need to disable DEP as it is a security feature as in it's default state should not cause any issues unless something really buggy is trying to run,also what version of flash are you running?i hope it is the latest version as some previous versions may cause that unless you changed DEP's default state. use process monitor and process explorer.

when it comes down to either more performance or quick removal i would take the quick removal as the speed that you may gain is small compared to the convienence of being able to remove the usb drive without having to press anything to tell it that it is safe for removal.for me when i plug a usb drive in, what i expect to be able to do is to use it as i require and remove it without questions asked.

you should leave the pagefile alone and let vista manage it also for the write caching put the first one back on but for the advanced option keep that off,also integrated graphics are a bad choice as they use system memory that could be used for better things.also tuning the default vista services won't yield much if anything in performance,also don't run vista on less than 2GB memory.

did you click on the network icon on the taskbar and selected diagnose and repair?have you applied sp1 and all current updates?have you tried updating your wireless card drivers?also have you changed any of vista's services and or turned off any features?

as a PC tech myself i will disagree with those saying UAC is useless/garbage, it is not but if you took the time to understand what it does and how it does iwhat it does you may change your mind about it,at first i did not like UAC but i needed to understand what is does and why it does it and now i don't mind an extra click and if you don't like UAC use tweak UAC instead as it keeps it on but eliminates the prompts if they bother you that much.as for vista i would check out tweakhound.

vista would run well if you doubled your memory and had at least a 256MB video card, if you cant do that then xp is the os that will run better for you.dale456654: if i were you i would upgrade to 2GB memory as 512MB is the min required and tweaking vista won't really help you and i would upgrade that low end sempron with an athlon xp which you can get on ebay,your hardware is limiting vista's performance(the memory is the main reason)