puzzling symptoms of slowdown on friend's 1545

Hi,

my friend has been describing these odd symptoms on his brand new inspiron 15, he seems convinced its vista being a crappy OS, but i dont think so.

he has the pdc T4200, 2gb ram

The following is what i copied from our conversation:

Chris says:
it feels like the CPU usage is at 100%
but the cpu usage is not at 100%
its like something somewhere has its grip on your computers resources and refuses to let any other app use it
it was like tat once
it kept stalling firefox
only went away after I restarted the com
but it wasnt only firefox tat was affected
when extracting my video files I noticed them moving much slower
and my 720p res videos stuttered
but my memory was healthy and cpu usage was healthy

anyone have any ideas? i reckon its a driver or some software misbehaving.

 

Brand new? Why buy a brand new PC with a PDC! the video card could cause the stuttering but otherwise it is quite low specs ∴ it will not perform well.

 

because the T4200 is the exact same chip as the T5800, which was phased out and renamed the T6400

not worth paying extra for the T6400, it was like an 80 quid upgrade!!

his budget was 400 pounds MAX, so at 369 it was a sweet deal.

anyway. im a fan of the PDC's for the low end. they have excellent performance, and you're not paying for the brand of C2Duo

im not expecting it to perform at the same level as my precision, but the tasks mentioned above are not exactly that heavy.

notice he mentioned that the CPU was not at 100% usage and the ram wasnt all being used up either.

what does the video card have to do with this?? the 4500mhd is more than enough for 720p playback

 

Was he running it on battery/power saver mode?

(and btw, a T4200 is a T3200 with 800Mhz FSB and 45nm, not a T5800)

 

I agree on what Tinsel said...

See my pc in my sig...I left by mistake the POWER SAVER mode enabled and saw a drastic slowdown in my computer. Tell him to verify if it is enabled or not and change it to high performance.

 

are you sure? the intel page shows the exact same spec as the T5800 (albeit half the cache disabled)

the T3200 was based on the T5750 or something like that, which was the predecessor of the T5800

thanks, will get him to check that and report back

 

ok it wasnt on battery, but i think it was on balanced or power saver, he changed it now. hopefully this solves the issue. thanks guys. are there any other things he should check?

 

nope, that should be all as Powersaver can limit it to about 800Mhz ish. too new to be overheating

 

yea hopefully that works. thx guys

 

Sure anytime!