I’ve setup VISTA on a “low end” system (2Ghz celeron, 480MB ram, 40GB HDD).

I’ve done extensive tuning to make the system bareably quick (I’ll detail what I did in a later post).

But just the other day, I noticed that the system seemed a lot slower than usual.

Using task manager, I found the culprit to be trustedinstaller.exe

A quick look around some forums showed a few complaints, and many people agreeing that trustedinstaller is related to automatic updates, so shouldn’t be disabled.

I tend to agree.

And I found the best solution is to use task manager, R-click on the process name -> set priority -> below normal.

After that, I couldn’t notice any slowdown (yet it would use as much CPU cycles as it could get away with)… After about 20 minutes, trustedinstaller.exe settles down to 0% cpu usage.

I wonder if the management of process priorities within VISTA and XP could be done better? A process that wants to use 100% cpu should (in order to deliver a better “user experience”) be automatically lowered in priority… I know unix does that very effectively (for a 40 year old OS!).