Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: What can I do to improve the speed of my Vista machine?

Darren
I am an IT professional and have alot of experience with XP and Vista. Vista def requires more horsepower to run than XP.2GB of memory is a good start, which I see you have. I am curious to know what processor you have.If its a slower Celeron based processor, it might not be up to speed for Vista's demanding requirements. Also when you buy a store bought PC(HP/E-Machine/Dell/etc) they come pre bundled with a boat load of startup items..A basic XP boot might have about 35 processes where Vista will have minimum of 50ish and I have seen upwards of 90 on a brand new PC. I would recommend clicking on Run and typing MSCONFIG and looking at the startup tab. If you are unsure of something, dont uncheck it(however if you realize later you need the process to startup) you can easily get it back by doing the same steps.Clean up some of the stuff that runs at startup or the ones the manufacturer gets paid to have run(ex. Internet Services, Google toolbar updater, etc)Also i was never a fan of Vista's Sidebar and have seen that bring a new PC to a crawl for the owner of my company.
Right click My Computer, select properties and check out your Vista Experience score level. See which component is holding you back. Depending on your make and model of your PC and motherboard specs, you can upgrade the processor to a dual core for around $100
All in all I would say the processor and amount of startup processes are the 2 big culprits with Vista. I hope I could be of some assistance. I am running Vista at work with a 1.86 Core 2 Duo processor and 2gb of memory. I like it as a work computer, but have no desire to switch at home even with a quad core processor.
I hope I offered alittle insight on a fix. I dont know how CNET works, but I will glady help you out if there is a way to email me through my Cnet login.

Otto

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/Has-Microsoft-Disavowed-Vista/?kc=EWKNLBOE020208STR1

vista is not about performance. it's about eye candy graphics and new unnecessary bells & whistles. there is so much overhead in vista that its taxing your system. for greater performance try Ubuntu Linux

I run avast & avg
but thank anyway

If the automatic protection is active on both antiviruses, it might be the culprit. Make sure only one is active.

Also make sure you uninstall Google desktop search. This can be bundled with Dell by default.

Dump VISTA and get a copy of Windows XP Pro while it is still available.

I'd say that every single one of my Vista nightmares was caused by antivirus software that was purported to work with Vista but does not. System slowness, web browsers that seemed to lock up, system instabilities I've witnessed were caused by AVG, Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky and ClamAV antivirus programs. It's not the same on all PCs; some work well with the aforementioned software, but some just flat out don't.

By and large the best AV software on Vista that I've found would either be Nod32 or BitDefender.

And yes, I like Vista.

/FLAME:ON

That's from pushing the tower button to start the machine till I can send an Email or log on the net.

My performance scores are:

CPU..............4.7 Pentium D 820
RAM..............4.7 2GB Kingston
Graphics......5.9 Nvidia 8600
Gaming........5.5 Nvidia 8600
Hard disk.....4.2 40GB drive IDE (note: I'm listing this one because it is the one I'm normally using now because of a foul up. The SATA drive that came with the computer is listed at 4.5)

Out of a possible 6

See previous post for tweaks

Hardware Improvements

Second GB RAM
new CPU cooler
Ready Boost USB
Video card
ethernet adapter 10/100/1000
second 40 GB Hard Drive (original is 250 GB SATA. see note above)
2 fans

Software I use to keep it running well

Iolo System Mechanic 7 Professional (real time)
IObit SmartDefrag (real time)
TweakRam (real time)

note: Real time means this software runs as the computer does.

note: System Mechanic 7 contains a security suite.

I'm afraid you have run into what I like to call the evolution of the Operating System.

Have you tried starting Windows 3.1 lately on your new machine or even on your Windows 98SE machine? It starts in seconds. I can remember DOS and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 taking up to 5 minutes to boot up. However when it was old and Windows 95 was released, Windows 3.11 could be started in a minute or two and Windows 95 took 5 minutes or more.

The point is that as the world of Operating Systems evolve, so does the hardware world. Microsoft and other OS vendors realize that they can do neat new things and make the user experience richer with the better hardware available. This makes our nice new hardware really work for its dinner and it always seems to produce a myriad of people complaining that the new OS is WAY TOO SLOW. It also seems to start a surge of upgrades in the industry as well as a surge of hardware inovation.

When Windows XP came out everyone said it was too slow and that the "eye-candy" was unnecessary and to blame. It's been almost 6 years and now XP runs so smoothly and everyone sings its praises.

Windows Vista will be the same. Where video cards with 3D processor were only an extra really used by gamers and serious 3D modelers, it is now a much needed accessory for your OS. Where 2GB of RAM was splurging, 4GB or 8GB will become normal. Granted the XP to Vista upgrade is almost as much of a resource jump as the Win3.1 to Win95 jump. It's, still the evolution of the OS and it is almost always this way.

To make the best of it. Throw a multi-core CPU, at least 2GB of RAM, a 10,000RPM SATA2 drive, and a good ATI or NVidia Graphics card at it and you'll be ok.

I tried Vista and I have to say that it looks very nice (now Windows and OS X both look good) however it really consumes memory (Vista 32bit won't support more than4gb of RAM and Microsoft should made it run faster even if it will run faster in the next few years. For now I use XP and Linux Ubuntu (I know it sounds strange but it has these visual effects that are really useful and look awesome and they work on my old laptop while Vista will take about 2 minutes to load vs about 52 seconds for the Linux system. Also I have no idea why Microsoft didn't include spaces for Vista's desktop like the new Mac OS X and Linux systems (many Linux systems had spaces for their desktops for more than 3 years ago). My point is, although Vista will get faster by the time when that hardware is gonna get better, Vista was supposed to be designed for the current hardware.

Microsoft are trying to make use of the latest hardware. The only thing I disagree with is the quality of use (with I assume should be fixed in SP2 but knowing microsoft this won't happen). I have never used vista my machine is too darn slow. But what I find is that I can get all the glitz of vista with Ubuntu without having to upgrade my hardware everytime they make a new release. Sure XP is good but it is to conservative for me (without mod (VTP8), with mod it basically becomes Vista with more bugs and less features). My hardware specs are not high and I can get most eyecandy in Ubuntu and maintain performance (512mb of ram, 128 intel 810i graphics card, 2.7ghz processor) and I can run XP well.
A previous suggestion, basically gave you list of freeware that you can download, I have tried most freeware when I had XP. This list is stuff I used (and the best config I had)
Winpatrol (500kb memory usage)
Comodo Firewall (Comodo antivirus is in beta)
Advast Antivirus
Iobit defrag (this is beta, I don't know how long it will remain free)
Spyware Terminator
This will give you reasonable security, but this you have to add on all the normal programs that you run (email clients, other GUI mods such as rocketdock)
Be warned this will be popup hell for most people, this is what drove me to Ubuntu. I can't have a secure computer without all this freeware. It is also quite difficult to close, with background processes that don't close when you hit close on the program, if you are frequent game player (Ubuntu ain't good at games).

Go to XP if you want to return the norm and stable (and Microsoft, just had to do that). If want a bit more adventure go with Ubuntu (I can recommend Linux, it really depends on what you want)
Or you can wait for Windows 7 (vista's replacement) which will probably have very few new features and just make windows more efficient. 2-3 years maybe.

I praise you dude, you really nailled the question.
Happy 2008 everyone!

If you can get a usb drive that is ready boost compatible, this will basically cache your start up settings so that vista reads them quicker at start up than accessing your hard drive.
I use SAN DISK 2GB Drive and i find it probably gives me a 10 percent boost at start up.

Buy a Mac.

That is what Micro$oft tried to copy and failed!

I don't understand all the hatred for Vista. I'm surprised Cnet even has posts on Windows when we all know they just love Apple. I wonder how much Apple pays them to love their products so much?

Let's see... Vista is just as good as XP. It requires a bit more horsepower, but nothing outrageous. XP requires a whole lot more than ME, 98, or 2000 did, so no surprise there. I've had just as many problems with my Apple computer as I had with Vista. If you see UAC come up a lot, blame it on the developers of the software, not MS. I see OS X ask for elevated permissions more than I saw Vista do it.

So basically, give me a break Cnet, Vista is no worse than XP or OS X, which you seem to be in bed with.