Slow vista. Need help!

fredzeppelin

Hi guys,

I'm hugely regretting putting vista home premium on my laptop that i bought about 8 months ago. It's desperate.

First of all i give ye the specs on the laptop.

Manufacturer: Dell
Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core T2080 @ 1.73 GHz
RAM: 1014MB
System type: 32-bit OS

Now the problem is that my computer is just very slow. When i go to open control panel for example it takes about 30 secs to display all the icons. They should pop up straight away no? As well as that I've to wait for ages for every thing to load up when i start the computer before i can i use it.

I don't have alot of data on the laptop because i bought an external hard drive or any huge programs either.

I'm seriously considering downgrading to xp pro. Has anyone got any advice on that or even on how to get a better performance from my machine at the moment?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Voodu Child

Well, you need more ram for one. Vista will be dog-slow with 1GB. Upgrade to 2GB.

That will make a big difference on it's own. There are a few other things you can do (disabling various non-essential services) but I would get more ram in there first, and then see how you're fixed.

StopNotWorking

No no it's an upgrade not a downgrade! I went from Vista 32-bit to XP Pro on one of my desktops and never looked back. Do you have Service pack one installed? I'd like to recommend some stuff but Vista can be a bit of a pig. Hold down windows key+R then type in msconfig, go to the startup tab and uncheck anything you feel might be useless, msn messenger, webcam utilities and the like. You can run them from the start menu when you need them, no need to have them load at start up.

Since you only installed it recently there would really be no point in recommending cleaning software(CCLeaner) and I doubt defragging would do much. I went through some what the same pain you did, I solved it by getting vista off my machine asap though.

dxhound2005

Hi Fred

There is another recent thread from someone with a similar problem to yours but he has XP. Turned out there was a process hogging 100% of his CPU. Did you check this on your Task Manager, I think it's Ctrl + Shift + Esc on Vista.

DigiJem

voodoo_child wrote: »

Well, you need more ram for one. Vista will be dog-slow with 1GB. Upgrade to 2GB.

That will make a big difference on it's own. There are a few other things you can do (disabling various non-essential services) but I would get more ram in there first, and then see how you're fixed.

Agreed, you need 2GB with Vista. Other suggestions may help but 2GB is essential.

galwayguy22

Less programs running in the background
Start > Run > type "msconfig" and hit enter.
Click "Selective startup", and then click the "Startup" tab. Untick anything in here that is not critical (by critical I mean Anti Virus etc). Most things in here can be deselected.

Click apply then restart your computer. When your computer restarts it will probably tell you that the startup has been modified. Tick "Don't show this message or launch...." and click OK.

Reduce Visuals
Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings. Click "Settings..." under Performance.
If you don't mind Vista looking like Windows 2000, click on "Adjust for best performance" and apply.
If you want to at least keep some visuals, I'd recommend selecting only the following
-Animate controls and elements inside windows
-Show translucent selection rectangle
-Show window contents while dragging
-Use visual styles on windows and buttons

Disable Services
Start > Run > "services.msc".
Right click on SuperFetch, click properties and set the startup type to be Disabled.
Do the same for the Indexing service. Here are some more services you could disable.

But yeah just upgrade to XP SP3.

galwayguy22

DigiJem wrote: »

Agreed, you need 2GB with Vista. Other suggestions may help but 2GB is essential.

Not true. I have Vista running in a virtual machine and I only gave it 511MB of ram and it runs perfectly fine if you disable all of the pointless features.

A tip for both XP and Vista users to speed up the responsiveness of the menus:

Disable all fading and sliding in Advanced System Properties then,
Start > Run > type "regedit". Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/control panel/desktop. With "desktop" clicked, look for the "MenuShowDelay" key. Double click on it and change it to 50 (miliseconds). Restart computer.

StopNotWorking

As stated above Vista doesnt exactly need 1GB to run. Vista auto loads certain programs into main memory if you use them often, it's a good feature in theory but a lot of people are very anal about how much of their RAM is being used by the OS when it is just idling.