Vista Problems

reidyg

Hi Folks,

I have two requests about vista. A friend of mine bought a new vista desktop with Home Premium. She asked me to help sort out a few problems. The first problem is with internet explorer. When she firsts logs on she can open IE however if she closes it and tries to reopen it, it won't open. When I open task manager I can see iexplorer running under processes with ieuser. For each time I try to open IE another process opens. Even when I terminate the ieuser and the iexplorer(s), It still won't open for me. I've installed SP1 but still no luck. As I'm still using XP and long may it last, I have little experience with Vista, which leads me to my second request.

As she uses the computer for mainly Photoshop I wanted to setup an account where I can run Vista with out all the fancy gimmicks. I know in XP turning off any visualisations and so on will free up RAM and any unwanted processes, but I was hoping someone with more experience with the OS can give me a few suggestions to make the most of the 3 gigs and quad intel 2.4ghz. Sorry for the length and thanks.

Deliverance XXV

reidyg wrote: »

Hi Folks,

I have two requests about vista. A friend of mine bought a new vista desktop with Home Premium. She asked me to help sort out a few problems. The first problem is with internet explorer. When she firsts logs on she can open IE however if she closes it and tries to reopen it, it won't open. When I open task manager I can see iexplorer running under processes with ieuser. For each time I try to open IE another process opens. Even when I terminate the ieuser and the iexplorer(s), It still won't open for me. I've installed SP1 but still no luck. As I'm still using XP and long may it last, I have little experience with Vista, which leads me to my second request.

Get rid of IE and get Firefox. Link

reidyg wrote: »

As she uses the computer for mainly Photoshop I wanted to setup an account where I can run Vista with out all the fancy gimmicks. I know in XP turning off any visualisations and so on will free up RAM and any unwanted processes, but I was hoping someone with more experience with the OS can give me a few suggestions to make the most of the 3 gigs and quad intel 2.4ghz. Sorry for the length and thanks.

3 Gigs of RAM should run Vista fairly smoothly. But if you want better, you can create a new account and turn off all the features manually. Aero interface and all the graphical options will use a bit of RAM alright. Other options is to stick in a USB memory stick and use readyboost. But TBH I have 3.25 Gigs of RAM and Vista works like a dream?

Where do you find the slowdowns?

reidyg

Thanks for the reply, but my friend is keen to use IE, especially for things like windows update but also to preview her photography on IE for web usage. Her biggest annoyance is the start up speed for Vista. Although I turned off a lot off start up programs I haven't had time to defrag the registry and MFT. She does find a few slowdowns in photoshop, especially when it comes to applying filters. Much of her photography is RAW based and 10.1 MPixels which can be quiet intensive especially with 16 bit images.

AlmightyCushion

King Nothing wrote: »

Get rid of IE and get Firefox. Link




3 Gigs of RAM should run Vista fairly smoothly. But if you want better, you can create a new account and turn off all the features manually. Aero interface and all the graphical options will use a bit of RAM alright. Other options is to stick in a USB memory stick and use readyboost. But TBH I have 3.25 Gigs of RAM and Vista works like a dream?

Where do you find the slowdowns?

Readyboost is useless if you have more than 1GB of ram.

yoyo

What anti virus came with the laptop? If its Mac Affee, Norton, Bulldog or something like that removing it will speed up your Vista system , Vista should fly with 3gigs ram as stated already especially paired with a Quad so my guessing is anti virus being the culprit, a good free Anti Virus is Avira from here

Nick

reidyg

She uses Symantec. I don't want to try to explain to her how intrusive it can be. To be honest I use AVG and have it turned off 99.99% of the time, but is it possible to set up a seperate log in account where I can turn off Symantec, Windows Defender, etc. and other non essential proccesses in Vista solely so she can get the most out of her machine. That way I thought it might simplify it for her so when she wants to surf or use the computer for other uses with all the Vista bells and whistles all she has to do is log off. It's my experience that when you change the services and startup programs in msconfig it applies to all accounts, or maybe I'm wrong?

highlydebased

reidyg wrote: »

Thanks for the reply, but my friend is keen to use IE, especially for things like windows update but also to preview her photography on IE for web usage.

Dont need IE for windows update- that happens automatically anyway

Can still use IE for photography use, but use Firefox for general web usage. Believe me, I made the switch 3 years ago and I have never looked back.

L31mr0d

sounds like shes installed some software that is causing a conflict with IE. What is the make and model of the PC she is using and what peripherals is she using.

My first guess, being that she uses photoshop a lot i'm guessing she does photography and has a printer and scanner attached to the PC, as well as a digital camera. My first stop would be to uninstall the drivers for any and all peripherals she connects to the PC, also to uninstall any imaging software that comes bundled with any of these peripherals. See if this fixes the problem, if it does then reinstall each peripheral one at a time, checking online for the latest drivers first, and see if the problem happens again and which peripheral is causing it.

In regard to turning off aero and effects, just right click on the desktop, select personalize>Windows Color and appearance>Open classic appearance properties... then select vista basic or standard

yoyo

reidyg wrote: »

She uses Symantec. I don't want to try to explain to her how intrusive it can be. To be honest I use AVG and have it turned off 99.99% of the time, but is it possible to set up a seperate log in account where I can turn off Symantec, Windows Defender, etc. and other non essential proccesses in Vista solely so she can get the most out of her machine. That way I thought it might simplify it for her so when she wants to surf or use the computer for other uses with all the Vista bells and whistles all she has to do is log off. It's my experience that when you change the services and startup programs in msconfig it applies to all accounts, or maybe I'm wrong?

Just uninstall Symantec She prob wont notice its gone anyway and that should make the machine much faster

Nick

Deliverance XXV

Taking Norton off, replacing with AVG and just turning on the Vista firewall and that will be a massive boost for your system.

glimmerman54

Hi, i had a similar problem removed a lot of the start up apps, does she use any google s/w like their sidebar or tool bars it may seem strange but i noticed a big difference once removed google side bar,
here is a good link for improving vista's performance also check the preformance rating see link

http://www.techsupportalert.com/make-vista-run-faster.htm

also i usually never shutdown my pc i just hibernate and vista does this quite well, however it usually stops my wifi from working properly on startup but i just turn it of and on again wifi that is i also have a bat file that achieves the same results,

now you installed sp1? for vista? it only came out like a month ago? your post is a year old?

IE explorer if you haven't already upgrade to the latest version or better still Firefox

and make sure you do a virus scan cos you never know...
btw disabling av sw is a bad idea imho i just spent a full day formatting a friends vista laptop because of about 100 or so viruses and other scum although i was able to retrieve most of their data they still lost a lot out on a lot and the worst thing was they had a av sw bundled with the machine they just uninstalled it because it slowed the system down so much and installed free avg so be carefull
and also avg by itself is no where near good enough in my opinion

Deliverance XXV

glimmerman54 wrote: »

now you installed sp1? for vista? it only came out like a month ago? your post is a year old?

Hi Glimmerman. The date you were looking at is the date he joined Boards.ie
The date he posted this thread was 4/4/08, you can find it on the very top left of the dark blue bar that surrounds his post.

glimmerman54

King Nothing wrote: »

Hi Glimmerman. The date you were looking at is the date he joined Boards.ie
The date he posted this thread was 4/4/08, you can find it on the very top left of the dark blue bar that surrounds his post.

your right sorry

Deliverance XXV

glimmerman54 wrote: »

your right sorry

I made the same mistake myself before

astrofool

A fresh install would probably sort out a lot of problems. While installing firefox might be a temporary band-aid, not having IE working (which is a fairly robust program) points to deeper problems in the system.

Install everything on a need to basis from then (install AVG instead of Norton for one). Accounts wise, you'll gain virtually nothing from trying to create another account, you're far better fixing the problems and keeping the amount of background programs to a minimum. Also make sure the graphics drivers are the latest and up to date, early drivers had very bad performance in Vista.

axer

reidyg wrote: »

Hi Folks,

I have two requests about vista. A friend of mine bought a new vista desktop with Home Premium. She asked me to help sort out a few problems. The first problem is with internet explorer. When she firsts logs on she can open IE however if she closes it and tries to reopen it, it won't open. When I open task manager I can see iexplorer running under processes with ieuser. For each time I try to open IE another process opens. Even when I terminate the ieuser and the iexplorer(s), It still won't open for me. I've installed SP1 but still no luck. As I'm still using XP and long may it last, I have little experience with Vista, which leads me to my second request.

As she uses the computer for mainly Photoshop I wanted to setup an account where I can run Vista with out all the fancy gimmicks. I know in XP turning off any visualisations and so on will free up RAM and any unwanted processes, but I was hoping someone with more experience with the OS can give me a few suggestions to make the most of the 3 gigs and quad intel 2.4ghz. Sorry for the length and thanks.

Have you tried running IE with no add-ons?
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/07/25/678113.aspx
Seems likely to me that an add-on is causing the problem. The add-on is not running until you run IE for the first time in then it is probably refusing to close down or something like that. Follow the steps in the link above and you should be able to narrow down the problem.

I don't think she needs to turn off anything to optomise vista for photoshop. Her computer should be well powerful enough to work away. If you notice an unusual amount of harddisk activity then check the size of the page file. If it is very high then you are running low on ram. You can use readyboost to help a bit but extra ram would be better. I very much doubt she is going to have that problem though unless she is doing a huge amount of photo editing at the same time.

Yes, also make sure her machine is fully uptodate and that automatic updates are turned on.

axer

King Nothing wrote: »

Get rid of IE and get Firefox. Link

Lol, the solution to all ms problems! :rolleyes: FF is no better - its a myth!

Capt'n Midnight

some stuff runs as system and loads up before user logs on and affects all users
other stuff runs as part of user profile

for programs you can use autoruns from sysinternals (bought by microsoft) to see what is set to run on startup and turn off the crud - disabling Aero is probably the first port of call too

for services at a command prompt type
net start
this will list running services
you can make a batch file to turn off stuff you don't need by
net stop "print spooler"
won't speed up startup but might make running a bit faster

axer

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

some stuff runs as system and loads up before user logs on and affects all users

That can be checked via the builtin windows defender.

I would rule out the addons for IE7 then also check windows defender for startup programs.

astrofool

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

some stuff runs as system and loads up before user logs on and affects all users
other stuff runs as part of user profile

for programs you can use autoruns from sysinternals (bought by microsoft) to see what is set to run on startup and turn off the crud - disabling Aero is probably the first port of call too

for services at a command prompt type
net start
this will list running services
you can make a batch file to turn off stuff you don't need by
net stop "print spooler"
won't speed up startup but might make running a bit faster

Or you could just disable the services from the services control panel Start->Run->"services.msc"

However, the amount of memory/cpu time these take up is so miniscule, that it's not really going to be a solution.

Aero is also grand (and can be faster than using the win32 GUI) if a decent graphics card is available, it's far faster to draw a screen using the 3d engine on a 3d graphics card, than to rely on the old windows drawing API's which consume cpu cycles.

Overheal

reidyg wrote: »

Thanks for the reply, but my friend is keen to use IE, especially for things like windows update but also to preview her photography on IE for web usage. Her biggest annoyance is the start up speed for Vista. Although I turned off a lot off start up programs I haven't had time to defrag the registry and MFT. She does find a few slowdowns in photoshop, especially when it comes to applying filters. Much of her photography is RAW based and 10.1 MPixels which can be quiet intensive especially with 16 bit images.

From restart command to rebooted desktop ready for use, a mid range machine can take about 5 minutes in vista. Mine does anyway. I do strongly recommend defragging the registry and the MFT though and running a registry cleaner tool also.

Slowdowns in photoshop would be attributed to the Processor speed and graphics card. I use Corel XI and have always experienced some minor latency issues but nothing that stops me from completing my work. When youre talking about a big image like that though I'd look at the GPU. What graphics card does she have, or is it Intel Extreme (integrated Graphics)?

As for the browser; not sure whats wrong there. But you can Install FireFox and then install the IE-Tabs Firefox plugin: it was designed specifically for webmasters and such that need to preview their pages in Internet Explorer (but wouldnt degrade themselves by actually using IE).

Taking Norton off, replacing with AVG and just turning on the Vista firewall and that will be a massive boost for your system.

Cant say wether this is true/false tbh. I do run Norton because my Machine came with 18 months of service. Havent tried running without it, so it is plausible you would see some boot-up improvements without it.

glimmerman54

Nod32 is a great AV software the new version uses very little cpu and its very powerfull