If your Vista PC isn't as speedy as you'd like, straight from the horse's mouth comes a 14-page PDF document on Vista Performance and Tuning. Microsoft's suggestions include customising Vista's power plan, sleeping the machine instead of shutting down, turning off search indexing in folders you don't need it, disabling visual effects, using ReadyBoost to add extra memory with a thumb drive, and disabling unneeded startup programs and services. All of these tips are old hat to seasoned Windows tweakers, but this PDF is a nicely-laid out and detailed package you can easily email to your brother-in-law.

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Windows only: Freeware application HeavyLoad tests your computer's performance under pressure by maxing out your CPU usage and eating up memory. If neither your computer nor HeavyLoad crash, the idea is that your computer fared well. There is no report after you run the test, and you can keep it running for as long as you want. HeavyLoad is not much of a diagnostic tool by any means, but if you're looking for a quick and easy way to test your computer's chops under stress, it's worth a look. If you've got a method you prefer for testing your PC's performance, let's hear about it in the comments.

Now that Mozilla's locked down Firefox 3's final feature set with Friday's push of release candidate 1, it's official: while Firefox 3 boasts some great new features like a smart address bar and better bookmarks manager, the best reason to upgrade will be for the performance improvements. Firefox 3 is noticeably faster and more stable than Firefox 2 to the casual user and Mozilla engineers have numbers that show it will be the fastest browser on the market. Tech site TechWeb reports:

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple's Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.

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Windows XP/NT only: We've shown you how to trim Windows down to the bare essentials and setting up pre-fetching for faster booting, but how do you know if your painstaking changes are having any real effect? BootTimer, a free measurement utility, asks you to restart your computer, then uses system logs to measure the distance between your boot-up screen to Windows log-in. You'll need to enable the program to run without prompting (un-check the "Ask before running this file" option on double-clicking in XP), and there's a small bit of promotion/donation prompting after it's done, but it's much easier than digging through verbose logs with a calculator. BootTimer is a free download for Windows NT and XP systems only.

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Windows Vista tip: Web site OCModShop details how to speed up your hard drive performance in Vista by tweaking an advanced setting to enable write caching and advanced performance on your SATA hard drive. The net effect of this tweak should certainly bring improved disk performance, but there is a catch: If you're not using a backup power supply—either a battery on your laptop or an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on your desktop—enabling these features increases the likelihood of data loss in the event of a power outage. Either way, this tweak is worth a look if you're looking to beef up your disk performance, and besides—you should already be using a UPS anyway.

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Windows only: Speed up your computer with a spare USB thumb drive with eBoostr, an XP-only application that brings the benefits of Windows Vista's ReadyBoost feature to XP. The app can work with up to four devices, up to 4GB on each, and its smart-cache feature gives speed boosts to your more frequently used apps and data. eBoostr could be perfect for XP users who want a little extra memory but don't want to install RAM themselves, or even for laptop users who've filled every free slot. eBoostr comes as a free trial version, which gives you four hours of functionality each time you boot up, or costs $29 for the full version.

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