Did you miss the first two parts of this story? Read Fix Windows Explorer and Fill in the Missing Pieces

Of all Windows Vista shortcomings, poor performance and instability are the least forgivable. By now, all new machines (and many older ones) easily meet Vista's requirements—a 1-GHz processor and 1GB RAM—but experience has shown that Vista can underperform on even the hottest hardware. If your 3-GHz quad-core hotrod system takes 20 seconds to open Control Panel, Vista can still be saved with a little sweat and not too many tears.

Yet Another Highway Metaphor

Your PC uses memory the way your car uses the fast lane: The more space you've got, the faster you can go and the less likely you are to crash. If your PC has less than 1GB of RAM and there's room for more, upgrading to at least 2GB is a cheap and effective way to give it the room it needs. Keep in mind, though, that anything more than 4GB is wasted on a PC running 32-bit Vista; you'll need the 64-bit edition—and an x64-compatible processor—to make use of 4GB or more of RAM.

Investigate Those Crashes

Believe it or not, Vista keeps track of every application crash, blue screen of death, and hung application you close through Task Manager. Just open the Problem Reports and Solutions page in Control Panel, and click the Check for new solutions link on the left.

Now don't expect the OS to fix all that many problems by itself; it's more a learning tool than anything else. When it's done "checking," it may ask you to send an unspecified amount of information—which may amount to hundreds of megabytes of log files—to help Microsoft create future solutions. Do it if you've got the time; as the saying goes, it's the only way they'll learn.

But if you want to learn something about what's crashing Vista, click the View problem history link back on the main page to see a list of recently recorded crashes. Right-click any entry and select View solution (if available) to see Microsoft's suggestions, but skip the View problem details entry unless you enjoy reading cryptic 16-bit Hang Signature codes.

But most important, review the Information about other problems section on the main Problem Reports and Solutions page to see if there are any software updates that are known to fix recent crashes. Don't be surprised if you see several update notices for things you've probably forgotten about, such as third-party video codecs and applications that aren't normally covered by the Windows Update feature.

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Who's the Resource Hog?

Your PC would be infinitely fast if it didn't have anything to do. Alas, it has plenty to do, most of which takes place behind the scenes. Whenever Vista's performance appears to drop precipitously, press Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open Task Manager, and then choose the Processes tab. Turn on the "Show processes from all users" option at the bottom, and then click the CPU column header twice to group the biggest resource hogs at the top of the list. (If you don't see a CPU column, go to View | Select Columns, and turn on CPU Usage.)

If all is well, you'll see the harmless System Idle Process consuming 95 to 97 percent of your CPU cycles, with a handful of single-digit tasks all doing their own thing. But if any task consumes more than 80 percent on a single-core processor system, or more than 45 percent on a dual-core processor system, that task is likely noticeably slowing down your PC. Try closing the program to see if the problem abates; if the program won't respond, use the End Process button to terminate it.

Mind Your Hard Drive

The speed of your hard drive has significant impact on your PC's performance and stability. Keeping at least 10 percent of your hard drive free is critical to decent performance: Show me a hard drive that's 95 percent full, and I'll show you a system that's sluggish and crash-ridden. And while there's disagreement about the effectiveness of hard drive defragmentation, defragging can't hurt and can help.

Unfortunately, Vista's own Disk Defragmenter utility (defrag.exe), which is supposed to keep things running smoothly, is slow, hard to use, and not particularly good at its job. If you want something better, it may be worth investing in PerfectDisk Professional ($39.99 direct).

Not only can PerfectDisk defragment your paging (swap) file, file table (mft), and file system metadata, but it pays specific attention to contiguous free space, which speeds up the writing of new files and reduces future fragmentation. And it has a pretty drive map to look at while it's working.

Make Vista Great: Part 1: Fix Windows Explorer Part 2: Fill in the Missing Pieces Part 3: Improve Performance and Stability Part 4: Solve Ultimate Edition Envy

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.