Use the Resource Monitor program in Windows to see which programs are eating up your bandwidth. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Esc to open up the Task Manager, then click the Resource Monitor button. You can view every application that is using your network and it even shows how much bandwidth on a per application level.
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Disabling Aero in Windows 7 can help improbe performance of your computer, especially if you play 3D intensive games such as Half Life 2, COD4, or even World of Warcraft. Windows Aero uses your video card to produce the “cool” and “gadgetized” effects you see through out the operating system.

To disable Aero you simply change your theme. With just a few clicks you can change your theme to a classic theme and save on system resources.

First open up your control panel. Start – Control Panel. Click the “Change the Theme” link under the appearance & personalization category.

Next you can select a theme from the “Basic and High Contrast” section below the Aero Themes. This will disable the 3D resources that Aero uses for it’s themes.

Today I went out and purchased Windows 7 Home Premium. After reading the differences between Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate I determined that all I really need was the Home Premium edition. The major difference between all three was the ability to run Microsoft Virtual PC with Windows XP allowing users to run Widows XP only applications. This can simply be done for free using VirtualBox, and with Microsoft’s Virtual PC, I heard it stunk really bad if you didn’t have a VirtualPC chip in your computer.

I chose the Custom install which allowed me to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 next to Windows Vista. The installer copied my old Windows Vista directory and my User to a folder called Windows.Old so I could easily access all my old documents.

Ok on to the the really important stuff. The first thing I checked was to see if World of Warcraft worked out of the box. It does! Not only does it work but all I had to do was move my WoW folder from the Windows.Old\Users\Public\Games folder to the new Public folder, create a shortcut, and start the game.

Next was Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 worked no problem out of the box as well. I had to re-install it along with service pack 1 and the patch for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

So far so good, I already notice a huge performance increase. I can really feel the new service manager taking place. In XP and Vista all your services ran 24/7 even if they weren’t being used. Now, in Windows 7 those services aren’t even started until Windows detects they are needed, freeing up gobs of resources.

Well, there you have it, my first impressions. WoW works, Visual Studio 2005 works, now to start using it.