A little while back, I came across a setting in Windows Vista that let me increase my computers performance (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options). It was set on "Energy Star" so I changed it to "High Performance". Everything on my computer went from fancy looking to generic looking and dull.

But, it turns out that my computers performance is much much much worse on the High Performance setting. I couldn't hardly do anything with Maya, in fact 10,000 polygons would crash Maya. I have it back on Energy Star and I can now open up all my Maya projects again. So, I'm happy about that now, but...I now want to create some tutorials but I can't run Maya 2009 and Camtasia Studio 6.0 at the same time. Maya keeps freezing up. At first there were some hot key issues, but I set all the hot keys in Camtasia (both main screen and recorder) to Shift/Alt/Ctrl. But it still seems like my computer can't handle both at the same time.

Is there a way that I can boost the performance of my computer. I'm guessing there is since it's on Energy Star right now, but I don't know how. Apparently the High Performance Setting isn't doing what it's supposed to do

EDIT: Ok, I played around with setting some more. The problem isn't the settings I mentioned above. It's the Visual Effects setting. If I set it to best appearance, then all is good, but if I set it to best performance, then I get the generic looking screens and performance is WAY BAD, hows that for irony. Anyway, I guess high performance means non graphical stuff maybe. Sounds like I need to invest in a better computer.