Frankly, optimization tools work but not to your expectations. Many companies (the creators of these great optimization tools during the day of XP) simply just fail to deliver much performance on Vista. I am not saying they are not efficient anymore, but rather I am complimenting Microsoft on doing a great Job! I know there are many complaints on Windows Vista, but hey - this is a complicated mission, who gets it done beside Bill Gates? NO ONE!

OK, I am not going into argument with comparing other operating systems, Vista is the kind of its own, and may be XP is similar to compare!

Back to the topic, I found that doing some manual tuning helped more than commercial optimization software, and some free tools that automate the registry tuning is helpful as well.

You can find all kinds of tuning tips around, try them first before you use any optimization software, because you can spend money anytime, but not necessary get the result for very penny you spend. Therefore, try the free tips first, then consider the tools later.

May be after more tips and tricks developed in the near future, some good software will be appeared to automate those tricks. For now, rather than spend any money on tuning tools, I prefer to spend more money on hardware for greater performance.

For majority people who do not want to spend more, I would still recommend manual tuning over software tuning, certainly you can use some free or paid tools to assist your tuning work, but you can’t 100% rely on them.

I have tried few optimization tools on Internet connection tuning, and almost each of them tuned rather differently…The parameters of MTU and RWIN is different between each software! Which to follow? You better stay with one tool at a time to find out the result.

My conclusion: Vista optimization tools are not a SCAM, but does not perform well at the time of this article, you can expect better result in the near future, may be 1 year hence forward? Meanwhile, optimize your Vista manually!