Vista help

My Vista is sloooow.
I just upgraded my machine to 2 GB memory, but its stil sloooow.

My processor is an AMD64 3200+
Would it spped up Vista if I upgraded the processor to an AMD64 X2 4200+ ?
Is the AMD X2 better for Vista?

And please DONT say I should go for XP, cause thats not an option.

I know what you mean, my new laptop is an Intel dual-core, 2GB, 160GB SATA with tripple partition (Ubuntu, Vista & XP - yes i finally found my disk :)

Vista is DEFINITELY slower than both for general computing on my PC. Ubuntu being by far the fastest of the three. In Vista, there seems to be massive delays when opening property boxes (5-10 seconds sometimes!) & anything to do with opening/copying/moving/zipping files is really slow, and the networking seems 'iffy', especially wireless.

Dual core E6600 here with 2 GB of RAM and ATI X1950XTX graphics card. SATA II disks. Vista Ultimate is basically as fast as XP and when opening property boxes the delay is at most half a second. I keep listening about Vista slowness but have yet to experience it. All my machines are now running Vista happily and there's no way I am going back.

Barney

Same experience as Barnabius here ( same CPU too, so perhaps it's an AMD issue. )

Can't really suggest anything to speed it up, because I've not really had to tweak anything. I am running with Aero off, but only because it's a personal preference. When I was running with Aero on, performance was still good. I'd assume you've already disabled Aero if you've having performance problems though?

I have an AMD64 3500+ and it is ranked by Vista as the slowest element (4.2 out of 6.0) of my performance index. So, I can believe that your processor is dragging down performance somewhat.

Short of replacing the processor, you could try:

1) Upgrading your video card. Not to the current generation (which would be over kill) but just one generation after your current card.

2) Defrag your hard drive and/or get a new faster hard-drive. My primary drive, which I run the OS from, is a small 10000 rpm drive.

3) Turn off Aero effects. When I do that, my system seems much faster, partially due to all the fade in/fade out effects being off.

HTH

- Try turning of the graphical eyecandy, and see if that makes a difference (Aero can be a big slowdown on some machines)
- Make sure that you have the latest drivers for all your components -- some of the older Vista driver releases are mediocre at best



That greatly depends on where the bottleneck is: If you look at your performance monitor, what does the CPU graph look like? If it isn't hitting 100% utilization often, then upgrading to a faster CPU won't make any difference since that's not what's causing the slowness.

And if it is hitting 100% use often and it is the problem, then keep in mind that going from 3200 to 4200 will only give a 30% improvement or so, which may still feel sluggish.

Another likely component for slowness is a slow harddrive. Any idea what make/model you have?
Definitely try to defrag your drive, and possibly tweak your virtual memory settings a bit. Try disabling your paging file altogether for a bit (to prevent excessive swapping to the harddrive) and see if that makes much of a difference. While you may not have enough memory for some programs to run without the virtual memory enabled, it may at least tell you if it's part of the issue you're having.

Last but not least: all things being equal, Vista is more bloated than XP. There's a lot of additional overhead under the hood (like the additional hoops a lot of the internal processes like audio playback go through, to support the new DRM 'features'.
Thanks to the added work your computer does, at best Vista is going to perform equal to XP did -- but more likely it's going to be slightly slower. There's nothing you can do to make it *faster* than XP since it simply has to do more work.

It doesnt help for me turning off the eyecandy at all, because the 3D card is doing most of the work anyway. It just seems a little strange, why the hell does vista need so much power in the first place? Other operating systems do everything vista offers (and more in some cases) at half the power required for even the minimum of vista requirements. The only answer i can think of is that is is very very inefficiently & badly coded - not a good thing when it (the os) is the most important bit of software on your PC.
If i watch the CPU monitor, both cpus look like they are processing under "normal" loads when performing these ops (very high but not maxed), its just sometimes boxes seem to take a long time to appear and all file operations i described above are tediously slow.

My graphicscard is Geforce 8500GT so I dont think I need to upgrade that.

Somebody told me that it will run better with a the DUAL CORE AMD AX2, but I just wanted to hear other opinions.

May I should just go for it, cant make my machine worse.

Well, I wouldn't be so sure that it's your processor that's the problem here. I have a now somewhat ageing single core P4 3.2Ghz processor and my system runs just fine with all the eye candy turned on. And the processor is also the lowest rated component in my system ... just 4.3. I would love to upgrade, but that would mean replacing my motherboard and RAM as well. Something that will have to wait for a completely new system build in about a year or so's time.

Also, the only thing that I have tweaked on my system is where the page file is stored. I have two hard drives and I have the page files for XP and Vista stored on there rather than on the same drive as the OS. I don't think is a significant performance gain from doing this, I just read in a magazine ages ago that it helps speed things up a little.

All the hardware mentioned here should be plenty and then some!! If people are getting slow performance with this stuff then there must be a problem with vista / vista configuration.
A new version of an OS is supposed to wipe the floor with the previous version, not rival it, especially on the specs posted above!

Vista is *supposed* to run on 800 Mhz!! - yeah alrighty then. (1.6Ghz is supposed to be its comfort level)



LOL!, I think the sticker on my brand new 2.xx Ghz Centrino Duo, 2Gb, SATA, ATI X2300 HD should be "Vista barely-capable" not "Designed for Vista".

Vista definitely runs better on systems with more than one CPU core. However, everything related to disk I/O operations --IS-- slower on Vista than it is on all other flavours of Windows. This is one of the things they promised to fix with SP1.

Try turning off indexing services and Windows Defender. You can also look and try if this sort-of-backup-and-versioning-system that is now integrated in the file system can be turned off; don't know what it's called, right now I am not sitting in front of a Vista machine.

vista works well on my system and I only have a a64 3000+

I did have a problem with office 2007 initially. I unistalled the stupid special search thing and my whole windows suddenly became as good as and in some cases more responsive than XP.