Speed up your Vista Start Menu
March 29, 2008 by lemmingsneverdie
You may have noticed how Vista often just doesn’t seem as fast as your old xp installation when it comes simple navigation around your desktop and folders. Menus take that extra fraction of a second to open, folders take forever to copy and context menus are annoyingly slow.
What a lot of people don’t know however is that this isn’t to do with the infamous resources hogging OS, but is largely just perceived or simply part of system settings. For example explorer always waits exactly 12 seconds before estimating how long it will take to copy a file - creating a impression of lagging. Also in xp copying files would seem to take less time because the system would dismiss the copy progress bar before the job was completely finished. In Vista it waits for the files to be copied completely from the system memory before dismissing.
I will be providing you with a few simple Registry edits to help speed up your system. Here is the first one today:
Load your Start Menu faster
Open either Start Menu or do window+R and type Regedit and press enter
This opens up the Registry editor for your system files. I recommend making a copy or backup of these files.
I didn’t. But I’m dumb… you should.
In the Registry Editor click through
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.
In here you will find a registry key called
MenuShowDelay
This controls the delay time between clicking the Start Menu and the menu opening up. Open it up and you’ll see the default value is 400. Change this to 50 and press okay.
You should notice the start menu opens up much more rapidly now.
Why not make the key even less?
Its pretty pointless, but go for it if you want. These values are in milliseconds. You’ll definitely see the difference between 400 and 50, but from 50 to less you just wont notice anything.
