Suggestions for speeding up a Vista laptop

[LiamC]

Vista really ins't my area of expertise so I'm after some suggestions.

The laptop belongs to my son's pre-school and the teacher there asked if there was any way to make it faster. It's a Dell Inspiron e6400 with (I think) a 1.7/1.8GHz processor, 512MB RAM (less what's used for graphics) & Vista Home. Booting/loading anything is painfully slow. How can I speed it up?

The machine is only used to play kids (< 5) games. Personally, I think the best thing is to load XP, but that requires tracking down a legit version of XP. Failing that, would 1GB of RAM make a noticeable difference compared to 504MB (free) under Vista?

 

[ddrueding]

Hell yes. More RAM would make a massive impact. I took one of my Vista laptops from 1.2GB to 2GB and it made an appreciable impact, I don't think you can fit "too much" into a laptop these days if Vista is what you have to work with. Last I checked, Dell was defaulting to 3GB on Latitudes with Vista.

Also, disable Aero or at the very least transparency. Make sure the power settings are correct (some I've seen even throttle the CPU when it is plugged in).

 

[Fushigi]

Yeah, add a gig of RAM or more. Of course if it has 2x256 so you'll replace a 256 with a gig but it still nets 768MB more & Vista will like it.

Crucial's configurator shows the system max RAM as 2GB and has a 2GB kit - 2x1GB - for only $50US.

Oh, also, don't forget to remove any crapware that came on the machine.

And install SP1; it will speed it up some.

To tweak performance-related settings like startup apps, Aero, and the like hit Start and type 'performance'. Select Performance Information and Tools from the list.

 

[LiamC]

Thanks guys.

The woman who looks after the machines (and asked me for help) said:
..."there is no way Vista is going on any of her machines at home"...

Redmond, we have a problem.

This is the first Vista machine I've played with. It looks pretty, but if you add either the Royale theme (Autopatcher) or the Vista transformation pack to XP, you are 90% of the way there. But ohh the sucky suck performance. To paraphrase, "vista sucks and anyone who likes it sucks. microsoft sucks and is as innovative as something thats not innovative at all." Ahemm.

 

[Fushigi]

As I said in the Vista thread I would not recommend upgrading existing machines to Vista unless there's a reasonable hardware investment at the same time to 'modernize' the equipment levels.

But I see no issue with Vista on a properly configured machine with new hardware. Properly configured means a 2+GHz CPU, multi-core preferred, and 1.5GB or more RAM. Add a good GPU if you want the full Aero, but that's optional.

Vista does more (mostly under the covers), so it takes more. It's no different than every prior Windows OS. They've all demanded more/better hardware than their predecessors.

Really, Vista on 512MB is not going to be nice. Upgrade the RAM and use it enough for SuperFetch to get usage info for the cache and it will run just fine.

 

[P5-133XL]

When Vista first came out, I installed it on a 3.2GHz P4 with 512MB and it was totally unacceptable: There were multi-second pauses between every action. Going to 1GB removed the pauses, and going to 2GB made it comparable to XP with 1GB. Getting extra ram is a big deal

This was with a gaming video card, but notebooks typically don't have the capability of changing their video card so you need to disable the fancy Areo else moving windows around the screen is going to be slow and jerky.

 

[Bozo]

Besides lots more RAM, turn the desktop, explorer and the start menu to Classic Mode.
Disable Indexing.
Disable UAC.


Bozo :joker:

 

[udaman]

Vista really ins't my area of expertise so I'm after some suggestions.

The laptop belongs to my son's pre-school and the teacher there asked if there was any way to make it faster. It's a Dell Inspiron e6400 with (I think) a 1.7/1.8GHz processor, 512MB RAM (less what's used for graphics) & Vista Home. Booting/loading anything is painfully slow. How can I speed it up?

The machine is only used to play kids (< 5) games. Personally, I think the best thing is to load XP, but that requires tracking down a legit version of XP. Failing that, would 1GB of RAM make a noticeable difference compared to 504MB (free) under Vista?

Is the e before 6400 to designate an educational only version, as I could not find that via quick Google search?

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,39050490,39176124p,00.htm

At any rate, PC2-5300 (assuming it's a 667Mhz bus) @1GB is rather inexpensive right now, just get one of them, pop it in and see if the system is more responsive, if not, upgrade the HD. I'll assume a 60 or 80GB on such a low spec'd system with only 512MB of RAM an Intel 945 integrated graphics, so upgrading the HD will make a difference, albeit it will cost more than the RAM upgrade.

Clone the internal 5.4k rpm drive to a new Hitachi 7k200 series drive, install that. That should make more of a difference in booting/loading, ...the bottleneck is the transfer of data from HD to RAM, most likely.
Should cost ~$100 USD, for the 100GB model. However, upgrading RAM is lowest cost, and if you can wait until the 7k320 series starts to ship, getting the 120GB single platter model will see slightly greater differential in performance btw the old 5.4k drive installed presently?

I assume the teacher doesn't have a backup plan, so use the 5.4k drive to do occasional backups.

 

[Santilli]

Generally, using headers and a free flow exhaust will increase
acceleration, and top speed, so, that should really help increase the speed, when you're dragging it behind your car...

 

[LiamC]

I got the machine yesterday and bumped the RAM to 1GB. Before that I had a play around with it to see how it operated. Gods it was painful, think Win98 with 32MB RAM. W2K with 64MB was more responsive.

After the bump, though, it was usable. Vista with 512MB is simply not usable.

The Windows Vista "usability score" with 512MB was 2.0. Bumping the RAM to 1GB and re-running the benchmark increased it to 3.1.

 

[ddrueding]

A lot of new machines ship with Vista and score about 3.0. I consider these usable. My UMPC scores a lousy 2.1, and even that is acceptable, except for the boot time.

 

[LunarMist]

Lucky you, living in the City or nearby suburbs.

 

[Fushigi]

Even my Dell D830 with 4GB RAM & a T7800 Core2Duo only nets a 3.2 But that's due to the graphics (nVidia Quadro NVS 135M 128MB). Other scores:
Gaming Graphics: 3.8
Memory: 5.1
Primary HD: 5.2 (Seagate 120GB 7200RPM)
Processor: 5.4

By contrast my desktop is 5.8-5.9 for everything.

 

[Mercutio]

For reference, a Celeron 430 (1.8GHz) on an i945 with 1GB RAM and a Seagate "AS" 7200.10 (i.e. total slug) will score between 2.0 and 2.2, with "Windows Graphics" as the lowest score. "Gaming Graphics", amazingly, is higher.

I don't know what the deal is with score variations, but I see them consistently with my lab PCs. I do not think the Windows Performance Rating can be used as any kind of reliable benchmark.

 

[LiamC]

Welcome back Merc!

 

[Santilli]

Being the cat in the bowling alley: What are the differences between XP, 2003, and Vista, that make Vista require so much faster hardware, and so much ram?

Thanks

 

[Bozo]

Being the cat in the bowling alley: What are the differences between XP, 2003, and Vista, that make Vista require so much faster hardware, and so much ram?

Thanks

"MS Bloat" :-D

Vista won't fit on a CD. It comes on a DVD and is over 2GB.
Most of the Bloat is from the graphics system and the GUI. Also there is a lot of crap loaded into memory at startup.
Most of the crap can be turned off. But even then it is a resource hog.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

What are the differences between XP, 2003, and Vista, that make Vista require so much faster hardware, and so much ram?

A lot of the excess is coming from some new security features. Disk-space-wise, Vista keeps a secure copy of every executable on a PC, which can require a substantial amount of disk space. Vista also does a lot of very aggressive caching of files in RAM, which in theory should make things faster but doesn't really seem to.
System restore, Indexing (fast searching) and Windows Defender are also partly to blame.

On top of that, Vista has Aero, which is not supposed to have an associated performance penalty, but with onboard video it's pretty easy to see that it does.

Gaming performance is hurt by changes to graphics and audio access in the kernel, and on top of that Vista DELIBERATELY cripples itself if you're using audio and network connections simultaneously.

What you need to take away from this is that Vista is doing a whole lot of pointless shit that isn't really helping you, the user. It causes a lot more problems than it solves, and most of the problems it does solve, are not problems that end users cared about.

 

[ddrueding]

Damn, well said Merc. Mind if I quote you on that?