How much faster should it be?

Hello all! I purchased my Presario (in my sig) on Sunday, and the performance is slow to say the least. I purchased a 1GB stick of RAM from Crucial last night and I was wondering how much faster the laptop will be when I add the RAM? Right now it takes about 3 minutes to boot up and takes about 30 seconds to start iTunes with Firefox and AIM running. I mean, Vista isn't so bad and I don't want to deal with reformatting with XP and stuff like that. I've already deleted all the crap that HP loads on these machines (Norton Security, MS Office Trial, muVee producer, some hp apps, etc.) I haven't really read about the difference in performance on the laptop with adding RAM. Thanks!

 

It's going to be faster, but not too much so. The limiting factor on your laptop looks like the processor. The Celeron will have problems processing the more intensive programs, unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it.

 

Yeah that's what I was afraid of. As long as it doesn't take like 3 years to open iTunes I'll be fine. Vista is a very decent OS, and will probably be much better once SP1 comes out. Plus, when I have no apps open and I boot the computer it only has 5MB of RAM left. No wonder the HD is always going...

 

You can try to configure vista to a better performance, try google for vista tips or tricks, stop unneeded services, uninstall remote differential compression, etc. etc. I will recommend vistamanager ( I not affiliated with them, just a happy user), just don't use their registry cleaner option, it will damage your vista installation, for registry cleaner use CCleaner, it's free and I didn't have any trouble using it.

 

It will speed it up a little but you probably will not notice

 

Vista is slow for the first couple of days until the system has optimized itself by defragging and indexing the files.

Since you already have 1.5GB you're already in the sweet spot, so you won't notice much difference if any at all.

Boot times will increase over time after you restart about a dozen times. But you are limited a bit by CPU and hard drive performance, but not tremendously so.

Also, don't worry about free RAM - unlike previous Windows versions, Vista is very good at using available RAM to cache the system and improve performance, and release it as needed to open and use programs. If you use Task Manager to view memory use, don't look at the free RAM, look at the Physical Memory Usage percentage or histogram for accuracy concerning free RAM.

You said you removed some of the bloatware, but you may have missed a lot of unneeded DLLs or registry entries. A clean install is the best way to rid a system of unwanted programs and files. Check out the Clean Vista Install thread for details...it worked perfectly for me.

 

Your CPU is killing you. That said you should be dual channel with 2 - 1gig sticks so it should help your overall system performance and video performance since your GMA 950 works much better with Dual Channel.

 

Actually that's not very true.

Vista will TRY but it has a bad tendency to push too much junk to the swap file. With only 1 gig of ram if you only use a couple of programs over and over again it can seem faster but if you ever go outside your routine Vista will slow to a crawl as it moves that cached data to the swap file. It doesn't matter if you aren't going to use what was cached in ram it will still move it to the swap file slowing your system to a crawl. It is the WORST memory management system ever devised. It is only practical for people who only use the same couple of programs all of the time or if you have a huge amount of ram with a very, very fast hard drive.

On my laptop under Vista just sitting right after bootup it had cached a ton of crap to ram that wasn't needed using all of the ram and it had also pushed 800 meg of junk to the swap file. When I loaded 3 applications I use most of the time the swap file jumped to over 1.2 gig!!!!!!! After I installed XP Pro my swap file after boot was only 298 meg. When I loaded the exact same three applications my swap file was only 386 meg!!! That's more than a THIRD smaller swap file. This made a HUGE performance difference because the hard drive access was cut to almost nothing. Under Vista hard drive access was always going on because of their horrid new memory management system.

So if you want to speed up your laptop under Vista look at getting 2 gig of ram minimum and changing your laptop hard drive for a faster one.

 

Right now I'm at only 512MB... not the 1.5GB like my sig says (just updated that so I didn't forget about it). Yeah the CPU isn't the best, but for what I use the laptop for (internet, e-mail, iTunes, word processing) it is fine. So going from 512MB to 1.5GB should be a good increase, right?

 

Yes, it will help. Anyway if you are worried about RAM memory management you can't turn off super-fetch under services. But I didn't see any improvement...

 

I went ahead and am doing a clean install of Vista Home Basic. I'm pretty sure all the crap that HP loaded on the machine is the main reason why it's so slow. I had Vista on my old HP with an AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+ 1.67GHz processor and 512MB of RAM and it was faster than what i have now. The clean install and the RAM upgrade will help speed the lappy up!

 

Ok with only 512meg...going to 1.5 will help a lot.

 

I think you've mistaken some info and disk activity. Read below...

Where are you getting this information? Not from the Task Manager I hope, because most users mis-read the info and believe that Vista is a memory hog when in fact it is not.

While it's true that Vista uses more memory for all the nice graphics and more processes, it's not overly unexpected and is about right for the increase over XP. For instance, a clean install of Vista Ultimate uses about 700MB of RAM for the operating system after loading the desktop and going idle, leaving about 300megs free for caching or programs with a swapfile set at about 700megs or so. RAM set aside for caching is shown as "used", but if needed, it's available to load programs and reduces the cache size dynamically.

XP was not as efficient with RAM, but Vista uses ALL AVAILABLE RAM to improve overall system performance.

New installations are an issue with this too. When people first try Vista, the system spends the next dozen boots over a couple of days to defrag and index the hard drive. This causes a lot of disk activity at first and people misunderstand that activity as normal and they think Vista is a memory hog and inefficient with disk caching.But after a couple of days, Vista settles down and becomes quite efficient and speedy.

In some cases, I've seen people remove Vista and put XP back in because they think Vista is a resource hog without giving Vista a chance to optimize the system for decent performance. Vista also does some things differently, and some people don't like that either...but Vista is actually a more intuitive OS than XP for typical users. Power users don't like all the changes and UAC popups, but those power users can also adjust many of the settings to retain more control, if they take the time to learn like they did with XP.

Many people commonly open Task Manager, read the memory usage and think that all of their memory is used up. And they think that they're using some 700+megs for the swapfile.

This is just a misunderstanding of how Vista manages memory. XP was a bit more obvious about memory usage, but Vista shows different levels of memory usage in different ways. The resource monitor is a handy utility to help see what's going on behind the scenes.

If you want to learn more about Vista and its memory management, Google for info about it and you'll learn that a swapfile size of 1.2gig isn't really 1.2gigs of swapped data - it's just memory space set aside in case Vista is needed. When Vista adjusts the swapfile size, it's just creating a larger swap SPACE on the drive, but it may not be writing any data to the file, just increasing its size (XP does the same thing, but not as efficiently).

The sweet spot for Vista Home Premium/Business/Ultimate is 1gig with the 32-bit edition. The sweet spot for 64-bit is 1.5gigs. More can be beneficial, especially if you use large programs or open large documents. But for most typical users, a gig of RAM is enough for the 32-bit version.

Remember that most users open a web browser and maybe an email program while surfing, and that's about it. Even today, most users don't use the windowed multitasking environment effectively. For those users who do open a dozen programs and some large documents, more RAM is essential to system performance. The rest just don't need all the power at their fingertips (however marketing campaigns make them THINK they need it which is why new computers are selling like hotcakes).

My three year old desktop with a gig of memory runs Vista just fine. The only upgrade I made to it was a larger hard drive for all the stuff I've downloaded over the years.

 

Well the sweet spot for Vista seems to be around 1.5GB, cause I will tell you this is like a whole different laptop with the RAM added. Bootup is still pretty slow but once the desktop shows up everything is speedy from there. Even the internet is faster, and installing programs doesn't take as long. I'm so happy with the computer right now, it's not even funny. Eventually, I will take out the 512MB and put another 1GB in there for a total of 2GB. But i'm very happy with my laptop now! Thanks for all the input!

 

I can say from experience that when I went from 1GB to 2GB, there was a huge performance improvement. With a few programs open, 1.5GB might be cutting it a little close, but it's still better than 512MB!

Also, bootup time is really a terrible way to measure the performance of your system. You should really be using sleep or hibernate when you shut down anyway. Only shut down or reboot once a week, or if there are patches or something that need to install.

 

to KSC
Excellent post!! I agree with you almost 100% ( and the disagreement is only about RAM vista uses, 1gb is the minimum for 32 bit , IMHO ). When vista is just installed it becomes hug and crazy for the firsts days, but after that it works smooth and quite well. As you said people tend to install vista and seeing how works they come back to XP without given the proper time to vista to work... Vista handles RAM better than XP, that's a fact. And you should keep an eye on the graphics card, I have a very powerful notebook, but lacking a good graphics card, and vista, even basic, was very slow a heavy. Now using my new notebook (see signature) , even that it is less powerful in terms CPU, RAM, Hard Disk, but has a better GPU so vista aero goes smooth and sweet....

 

Sure it's faster, but you went from 512MB to 1.5GB, which is a big difference for Vista. Take out the single 512MB module and run Vista with just 1gig and you'll probably find it about the same as with 1.5gigs (depending on programs run of course).

Half a gig is way too little for Vista.

 

I have to disagree with you there. I'm sure going 512M to 1G will make a nice difference, but the system is still very hobbled. I cannot speak to 1.5GB, but I know from personal experience that the difference between 1GB and 2GB is huge. 2GB is the sweet spot for Vista, not 1. 1.5GB should be noticeably different than 1GB.

 

Thanks, yeah I've seen a lot of complaints from new users with Vista, but after a while they usually change their mind.

And there's a lot of misinformation out there about operating systems, and myths continue to make the rounds.

Mine uses just the GMA 950 and it runs great. I used a friend's with a Geforce go 7400 and found no difference for aero, office apps, photo edits, etc.

I don't game with mine though, other than Chess.

 

In a couple of months I plan on getting rid of that 512MB module and am going to put another 1GB in there (plus it's cheap at $50 anyway). But the whole computer experience is just better than it was before. But the performance is getting better as the days go on; guessing that's due to Vista settling in and getting the indexes right.

 

Use these links to give the system a little boost.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2151209,00.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2164560,00.asp

 

So how do you like your new notebook? I was going to get that same presario but I opted for the HP. It's a good looking machine. I like the feel of it.

 

I have been more than satisfied with my new Presario. I also agree that the machine is very nice looking. Many people don't like the black and silver combo, but I think it looks classy instead of having a boring all black or all silver laptop. The performance isn't the best but adding RAM (1.5GB would be the least amount I use) really helps out Vista and aids the processor as well. At only $379, who can argue with the performance anyway?

 

thats what iam hoping,i plan on adding 2gigs very soon,i also deleted alot of bloat and vista and overall perfomance is alot faster..............