Cause(s) of slow performance

Hope this is the right forum, my question is not so about the OS, but of what exactly causes the OS run slow. By slow I mean thinking a bit while openning all the icons in control panel, slight delays when openning folders, etc. Not a big deal, but on another laptop which is winXP and P4 2.4ghz everything flies.

On this laptop I am running vista basic with the most plain configuration - all even 'basic' graphics effects are turned off, normally about 48 processess running, many services are turned off (such as security center, win update, defender, firewall), running jetico firewall (very light) and mcafee virusscan (a bit of a resource hog).

Basically I was wondering what exactly makes my laptop slow(-ish), and is there a point to put XP instead of vista, would it result in noticable improvement?

1) Hard drive 40gb 4200 (my primary suspect, hoping to upgrade with SSD when they get cheaper)?

2) Core Solo U1400 1.20GHz, but is kept down to 800mhz?

3) graphic card - intell 950?

4) RAM 1gb installed (in use normally only 400mb)?


Thanks!

 

1,4,2 should be the main causes and in that order. Have you tried Readyboost with a fast USB stick? Your laptop would be ideal. Little ram and slow hard disk.

 

I haven't used Readyboost yet, I will try it. Why do you think RAM might be a problem? At the beginning I was thinking to upgrade it with 2gb, but then every time I look in the task manager on performance and it never shows that it uses RAM more than 400mb.. so I thought maybe it does not need more?..

 

Vista manages memory differently than XP so in XP when you say "I'm only using 400mb", it's different than the same in Vista. Basically I'm saying it's an apples to oranges comparison.

Vista has a feature called SuperFetch, which watches what you commonly do and tries to load the most common applications and system files used into memory. If you had 2GB you would probably notice memory usage around 1GB.

Basically memory would be your biggest benefit, followed by a faster HD, then ReadyBoost.

 

deputy, thanks, I didn't know. RAM is ordered