just bought new hpdv6208nr turion...awful results..any ideas?

New to this forum. I tried doing a good deed by picking a laptop for my mother-in-law to use for basic e-mailing word processing and that's it.
Picked up this HP as it was a good deal, it has Vista installed, did the Best Buy computer optimization to supposedly get rid of excess junk. Brought it home to try out and boy is it slow...took over 45 secs just to turn on, everything runs at a snail's pace. I am mac user...is this the norm for HPs? Any suggestions for basic laptops that run at normal speeds. My mother in law wanted me to buy it locally so she could take it in for service, she used to have Dell but cannot understand phone techs now because of her hearing loss and their accents. Also did not want Mac because she is nearing 80 and too old to learn new system. Now stuck with 15% restock fee on this lousy HP..what to do. any ideas appreciated!

 

thats what you get for buying a low end system preloaded with vista....a snail pc

 

So I guess no way to speed things up and no way to get a computer with the old XP which is what she was use to anyway?

 

Ouch, that was a harsh response airman.

If i'm not mistaken, you should have a 2.0ghz Turion X2, 1GB ram, and a pretty decent video card. also a 5400 rpm sata drive.

You by no means should have a slow PC. it sounds like there is most likely a LOT of extra crap thats loaded on there.

You could definitely install windows XP on it if you dont want Vista, which is more taxing for sure.

Let us know about some more details

 

45 seconds to turn on may be about right -- the currently available Conexant HD Audio drivers seem to slow down boot-up tremendously. That should be fixed in a future update. Also, there's no reason to "boot-up" your system with Vista. Vista wants to either be put to sleep or into hibernation mode. It really isn't designed to be shut down and booted-up. Put it to sleep and wake it up instantly. If in hibernation, it should come back up in 10 seconds or so.

Also, my reading of the system specs is that its a single core AMD Turion processor, not a dual core. Combine that with 1 GB RAM (which is partly shared with the graphics card) and you have a not so fast system for Vista -- not terrible by any means, but definitely not blazing fast. I would HIGHLY recommend getting a 1 or 2 GB USB drive or SD card to use with Vista's ReadyBoost feature. That should help the system "feel" quite a bit faster given those specs. USB Drives work better, but since its a notebook and may be moved around a lot, using a fast SD card in the notebook's SD slot can work too, but cheap SD cards often aren't fast enough. I use a SanDisk SD card in my notebook and it works great for ReadyBoost. Either way, don't expect an improvement right away, but after a day or so of use, many of the small, frequently accessed files will have been backed up to the ReadyBoost device and the system should feel faster.

Hope that helps.

 

Ditto what jadedraverla said.

Vista is so bloated that a singlecore CPU and 1GB RAM is going to be slow. A Turion X2 and 2GB RAM would be about right. 1GB RAM is forgivable, that's easy to upgrade later, but HP really shouldn't be offering singlecore Vista machines. I bet HP demanded that AMD build them a singlecore Turion CPU though.

 

Thanks for the helpful advice. The irony is I was torn between the dual core( which was only about $175 more) and the one I bought, single core. When I told the salesman the limited use the system would receive he sold me on the single core but did not inform me how this would slow the system to a crawl. Not being at all familiar with Vista, my fault, I had no idea of its energy zapping powers. At home, I was on the laptop for over and hour and still did not make a dent in any of the set-up features, I mostly just watched TV while it ran continuously and gave the message "program not responding" to almost everything I did. I guess my best bet is to have it out with my salesman tomorrow and upgrade to the dual core system. I will also have a look at the Sandisk SD card to see how much that will run. Does anyone manufacture inexpensive systems for little old ladies who just want to run their e-mail and do word processing? That's really all I was looking for to help her out. No good deed goes unpunished! Thanks again to all!

 

I'm not conviced you really need dual-core for her limited use. For most people, dual core and Vista go hand in had, but for just surfing and email you really shouldn't need to spend more. I am a little concerned that you let Best Buy's Geek Squad touch it. (I was one for two days, before I quit because I had such a problem with their business model and what they did to people's computers). That might be causing who knows how many problems. It might be worthwhile to do a full system restore to Hp's original configuration and seeing if that solves a number of your problems. Also, if you can get a good deal on a ReadyBoost device that should help quite a bit, but probably not as much as the higher-end system. I would check the price and then determine which is the more logical way to go.

As for your question about anyone making inexpensive systems for people who just want to do wordprocessing, etc. the answer is yes, almost everyone did, and then Vista came out and wanted a higher end system to run effectively. It will probably take a little while for hardware prices to drop so that inexpensive Vista systems perform at an ideal level.

 

I dont know. i have tried vista on all of my pc's, and it didnt run slow at all.

Even my 4 year old Dell 5100. 2.8 Pentium 4, 1 gb ram, 32mb at graphics card. ran awesome!

There might be something up with the pc itself, or maybe the dork squad hosed it to be ****ed.

"this program is not responding" messages arent good.

 

oh and about the ram thing, i have a desktop that i built, and at the time installed vista on it, it had 512 mb! ran like a champ!

 

hehe sorry I was in a bad mood at the time of my posting, try a clean install with XP that should speed things up a lot.

 

OK, that you shouldn't be seeing. I'm starting to wonder if Geek Squad screwed up something too. Time to make use of that restore partition that's chewing up a big chunk of your HD. But first, run Task Manager and monitor your memory usage when the system gets unresponsive. If usage goes above 1GB... that will slow the system to a crawl very easily. I'm more suspicious of what the Best Buy guy did to your notebook though.

When you said "slow" I was thinking sluggish, which it probably will be... to me at least. For little old ladies it'll probably be fine.

 

Another vote for a full reinstall with HP's restore disks. The single core CPUs are just as good as dual core CPUs for your purposes, that should be clear. 1gb RAM is also the most cost-effective solution right now and is absolutely sufficient. I believe your Task manager will reveal the truth about your problems - it could be that something uses all your CPU resources or that many things fill all your memory.

 

Alright, let's all agree I was total sucker at Best Buy! Based on your feedback, did research last night into XP systems available and looks like Dell still selling some. I may just force the MIL to take another Dell, we have a couple around here for the kids that have always worked well. The MIL wanted Best Buy so she could go in and see Geek Squad "in person" if there were problems, thought that would let me off the hook from trying to solve her pc problems as well. But sounds like from these posts, the geeks might not be so great themselves!
Going in to do battle with BB customer service at 10am...see what happens. You guys are great! Thanks for putting up with the newbie Mac girls stupid questions.

 

Just for closure, I was able to return the HP for full refund to BB after telling them about the "not responding" message so it was classified as defective. Geek Squad guy there said it was, in fact,running much slower than it should be and offered yet more services but I decided to get my money back and think on this problem a little longer. Maybe wait until some of the initial kinks are out of Vista or continue my search for a system with XP. Thanks again all comments were most helpful. I'm starting fresh!