Ubuntu has a powerful raft of power management features, accessible through System > Preferences > Power Management, but you might notice one missing if you're used to Windows or OS X: hard disk spin down time.
By opening a Command Prompt session with administrative privileges, you can use the defragmentation program with various command-line options. (For details, type defrag /? at the command prompt.).
The problem that many users have with startup programs is not creating them (that's easy, and in many cases it happens more or less automatically), but getting rid of them. Having too many startup programs not only makes your system take a longer time to start, it also has the potential to waste memory. If you don't require a program at startup, its a good idea to get it out of your startup path.
One of the things we spend most of our time doing at a PC is waiting for applications to start. Larger applications, particularly, can take what seems like an eternity - OK, 10 to 15 seconds on a fast PC - before they're ready to use. And small programs, even though they load quickly, don't always "pop" on screen as quickly as one would like.
You can optimize Vista all you want, possibly shaving 15 or 20 seconds off your boot time, or you can approach the problem from a different angle.
Once the DVD-ROM has booted in live distro mode, and you're run the installation program,
you may get error messages or experience other difficulties. This article offers some solutions
to common installation problems.
If you've upgraded your PC from an earlier version of Windows, there's a chance you're still using the FAT32 filesystem. Assuming you don't need to keep FAT32 for compatibility with other operating systems, you should convert your drive to NTFS. The process is easy, relatively quick, and won't harm your data (although you should back up beforehand just to be safe).
Clusters are the smallest units into which a hard disk's space can be divided. A hard disk formatted with the traditional FAT system, found in Windows 95 and an ancient operating system called "DOS," can have no more than 65,536 clusters on each drive or partition. This means that the larger the hard disk, the larger the size of each cluster.