48. Disable the low disk space check

If you've got a second hard drive that is filling up, or a partition that's getting near its space limit, Vista will warn you... And warn you... And warn you, with little pop-up notifications appearing in the taskbar every little while. This can get annoying fast, especially when you see that the system is polling the disks every few minutes to bring you this important warning. It's quite easy to disable though, with a quick registry hack doing the job.

One caveat: Having a decent amount of free disk space IS important if the partition in question is your C: drive where Windows resides. If you want to disable this warning, pay occasional attention to the state of your file space please.

To disable the low disk space check/notification:

Open the 'start' menu, type 'regedit' and hit Enter.

Navigate to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies'

If you have a registry key named 'Explorer' at this location, click on it to open it. If not, create one by right clicking on the right hand pane and selecting 'new/key.' Call the new key 'Explorer.'

Navigate to Explorer and create a new DWORD value named 'NoLowDiskSpaceChecks' and give it a value of '1'.

Disk checks will now be disabled.

49. Disable 8.3 name creation for files

The 8.3 namespace is a method of naming files used in DOS and Windows 3.1 (for example myfile83.exe). This naming standard has not been necessary since Windows 95 hit stores some 12 years ago. To maintain some illusion of backward compatibility the feature has been kept, and if you do happen to use a DOS-based 16-bit application that can only recognize 8.3 character file names, you will need it. Otherwise, as Microsoft itself says:

"The creation of 8.3 filenames and directories for all long filenames and directories on NTFS partitions may decrease directory enumeration performance."

...In other words, it's slowing you down.

To disable 8.3 name creation in Windows Vista:

Open the 'start' menu, type 'regedit' and hit Enter.

Navigate to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem'

Change the value of the 'NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation' DWORD to '1'.

50. Disable last access file update

By default, any Windows installation that is using the NTFS file system (that is, almost any installation of Windows 2000 or later) updates each file with a date stamp every time it is accessed. If you don't think this feature is useful, save yourself some unnecessary disk access by disabling it. Note that this is not the same feature as the 'file last modified on:' information that appears when you bring up the properties of a file in Explorer, so disabling last access update will not disable that information.

To disable last access file updating:

Open the 'start' menu, type 'regedit' and hit Enter.

Navigate to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem'

Change the value of the 'NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate' DWORD to '1'.