DescentBB

Would it speed up a Vista on a satellite_A305-S6905 by turning off indexing?

I wouldn't expect a significant difference, indexing runs at the lowest priority so it won't get in the way of anything else. I think Vista even shuts off indexing automatically when the system is on battery so it won't even make a difference there. Any number of services running on Vista are just going to be a drop in the bucket, if performance is a problem the more likely culprits are excessive autoloading applications, bloated antivirus hogging up CPU cycles and insufficient memory.

Thanks Krom, I checked his processes and they are very clean, this guy won't load anything on his computer without calling me first.

I'll check his RAM. the computer is not more than a couple years old but these days that's like light years away.

Another related question. Is there any kind of a program that would "benchmark" their computer against an optimized similar computer to see if it's running slower and if so how much?

I know about speed tests for upload and download speeds but just overall more general information.

Upload and download speed tests only test the speed of the internet connection, they have almost nothing to do with the machine they are being tested on.

Simple benchmarks that rate the system against others are more often than not synthetic and largely meaningless. As for the memory; computers are chronically sold with insufficient memory. Vista needs 4 GB to run well and in the future may need even more (except the 32 bit version which usually can't use more than 3 GB). One other likely cause for slowdowns would be a fragmented hard drive, Vista defaults to defrag once a week; but the computer has to be running for it to happen.

Good points. I'll have him run Ccleaner (just to get rid of temp, trash, cache....) no registry tweaks. He's already run Malwarebytes and then I'll have him defrag.

Any recommendations for defragging progie besides the Win Vista one?

Just use the built in defrag, safest and most reliable in windows.

Defraggler, made by the same people behind CCleaner is pretty good as well.