New M1530 issues

Hi, first time poster and very limited in computer understanding. Just got my m1530 laptop with the following specs.

core 2 duo 2.4 GHz
3GB of RAM
160GB 7200rpm hardrive
Nvidia 8600M GT 256MB of GDDR (2 or 3?)

I got windows vista premium, booted it up and after spending some time i found that it takes a bit to long to turn it on and off, about 1-2 minutes. While on, the CPU usage seems to jump around alot. It goes from 5% usage to 50% or sometimes even 90-100% in both cores and then back down on and off. I'm also using an average of about 1.5GB of RAM with nothing turned on except for a few of the start up programs. As far as i can tell no one program is causing it, and when the cpu usage spikes it tends to lag for a moment. I dunno what's causing it, hoping to maybe get some insight, thinking about rebooting to windows xp after this as well.

Sorry if my post is in the wrong forum, not detailed enough, or just foolish. I'm not very literate when it comes to how computers work, hope someone can offer some help.

Thank you,
Ignat

 

How vista works is that it uses memory if its not being used. Why not use your memory if your computer isnt using it for something else? That was Vista's philosophy. Course Vista is a lot more memory intensive then XP. As for the large CPU use i am not sure why but google might be able to find your answer. Honestly I wouldnt use Vista by choice. But service pack 1 is coming out soon and going to make Vista a lot better.

 

Sounds like far to much to worry about. I'd switch to xp pro.

 

would agree, but apparently for a novice installing XP Pro on these dell's is no joke...since they purposely did not write drivers for XP (i'm sure microsoft really does NOT want them to).

 

Reformat Vista, it comes preinstalled with a lot of rubbish.

 

Click on the start button and in the search bar type 'System Config'.

Click and run the 'System Configuration' app that's shown and click on the 'Startup' tab. That will show you a list of everything that's starting at run time. Most of it is not essential and just slows things down. Post up a copy of your list and someone can help you determine which apps need to stay and which can safely go.

FWIW - with a much lower spec'ed machine than yours, I'm able to boot from post to login prompt in under 30 seconds.

 

Vista may make a poor first impresssion, but should improve over a few days. It may be indexing your disk, updating software, making backups. It also learns what programs you use, so it can load them into RAM. These processes should improve in a couple of days. You can also disable this behaviour.

Also, you probably have bloatware.

 

Reinstall Vista using the installation Disk (don’t restore from the built-in recovery partition). That should make things a lot better, because DELL usually send their notebooks loaded with bloatware (unnecessary adware and trial ware applications).

Maybe your shutdown delays are caused by Windows updates. However, if it doesn’t improve after few days then it could be something else .

 

You may want to try (up to you) Vista SP1 RC which is making Vista run smoother now.

 

Keep in mind that if you do install SP1 RC, you'll have to Uninstall it when Vista SP1 Final comes out.

 

Damn you are right I totally forget about these things, silly me . Khris is correct you will have to uninstall the RC version in order to have SP1 proper so it probably isn't worth it, most people have predictied that SP1 should be out very soon.