Just upgraded ram on T400...no difference

I just installed a 2 gb stick of ram on my new T400 to make 3gb. I'm running vista home basic. is there anything software-wise that i need to do because I can't notice a difference. it still takes a full 5-7 seconds just for IE to come up or open excel or word. If this is how things are going to be, I will quickly be downgrading to xp.

 

Whats your other specs, excel should be like 2-3s tops

 

5-7 seconds for IE, Excel, and Word. Seems about right. How fast were you expecting them to open?

Internet Explorer is just slow, there's nothing you can do about it. Hence the popularity of Chrome, FireFox, Opera, Safari... am I missing any?

Word and Excel run antivirus checks everytime you open a document which causes some slowdown but this is not specific to vista. I don't think XP will be noticeably faster than vista at using these. A faster harddrive on the otherhand would speed everything up. Are you using a 5400rpm or a 7200rpm drive?

What made you choose vista basic? Without the sexy aero what's the point to using Vista at all?

 

It was the cheapest option and I already have a copy to upgrade to vista business or downgrade to xp pro for free. Still trying to decide. I have a 5400rpm hard drive. I'm not looking for a supercomputer, I'm just sick of looking at that rotating circle every time I click on something with Vista.

 

Please await my response; it should take 6 weeks to arrive by the fastest carrier pigeon available. Too slow? That's how they did it 'back in the day' - just be patient!

 

You should realize that RAM has little to do with the initial loading of programs (with the exception of that prefetching thing, whatever it's called). RAM simply allows you to open a lot of programs and switch between them quickly.

If you want to open files (including applications) faster, you need to get a faster hard drive. That's something a lot of people overlook. A 5400 RPM hard drive is obviously not going to be that fast...

 

Another issue might be tabs. Are you running the latest version of IE? How many tabs are you having IE load?

I recently found out is that the latest version of IE, as well as Chrome, runs tabs as a separate process. Firefox, and apparently older versions of IE, run the whole shebang as a single process.

Running them as a separate process is supposed to allow for increased performance on multiple-core systems. However, I've also heard that it bogs down dual-core processors - perhaps this is your issue.

I use firefox and have it remember my tabs, so it takes a while to open and load everything, and often runs slow. I just wish IE wasn't so heavily exploited and that Chrome had access to some of the essential firefox addons.

Anyways, that's my two cents. It could just be that your 5400rpm hard-drive is the bottleneck, as the previous poster said.

 

I agree...hard drive. Ram is if you want a lot of programs open. I think people tend to over generalize that ram makes a computer "faster." It is the easiest upgrade to improve speed, but only if you were using most of your ram already.

 

Chrome loads up fairly fast. Too bad it is lacking in some areas.

 

Many of the posts in this thread are from clueless people, ignore them. If it takes 5-7 seconds to open Microsoft Word, you have a major problem somewhere. Once cached, it should only take a second, two tops, for the application to appear. Kudos to you for getting more RAM though—1GB is on the low end for a modern system.

My advice to you? Do a clean installation. OEMS, AND THIS SADLY INCLUDES LENOVO, HAVE FETISHES FOR PRODUCING PSEUDO-INNOVATIVE SOFTWARE AND RELATED WHICH, LARGELY, CRIPPLE POWERFUL HARDWARE. Perhaps we should start a class action suit to get this major problem resolved (and line the pockets of some forward-thinking attorneys).

 

Wouldn't the OEM software you mention have been even more of a problem when he had only 1gb? If so, wouldn't he then be seeing at least some degree of improvement after upgrading to 3gb?

If he's not seeing any improvement after upgrading to 3gb, I don't see how OEM bloat could be the issue here. Maybe I'm missing something, though...

 

Maybe for both.

I’m not necessarily blaming this on OEM additives, but a clean install, sadly, has a way of doing “something truly remarkable.”

 

Thank goodness you're here to show us the error of our ways. What did we do before you arrived? I honestly can't remember. We do the best we can with our limited intellect and all.

If you're running Vista, it's just plain slower than XP. It looks better, but it's slower. The seek times on the hard drive will help you more than the additional memory. If you want it to be really fast, get a SSD. The clean install will help your machine boot faster and make it feel a little more snappy, at least that's been my experience. If you do a clean install you'll lose access to the ThinkVantage button in Windows if you care. As always make the recovery discs and make a copy of the SWTools folder before doing anything.

 

Unlike you, there was no sarcasm in my post. Several of the other posts are flat out wrong—people, please stop giving out bad advice. It SHOULD NOT take 5-7 second to open standard applications like the ones he described. I apologize, but any posts that try to explain why this should be normal are nothing more than deranged attempts at mental mast*rbation.

 

Perhaps others posted faulty information, but it is an opportunity to correct the mistake, not criticize. A little humility in life goes a long way.

 

Anyways...I suppose could also offer to op that he could play with caching in vista given that he has more memory and see if that helps out his load times. But ya...a couple seconds seems more normal.

I completely turn off the prefetching cache that vista does with an ssd (and well I only have 2gigs of ram).

 

You know what Zaz? You and binkNR are both saying the same thing, that the Windows file system could be faster at starting things. Thats just the slowness that a sophisticated operating system will show. Largely I agree with binkNR and you.

-Renee

 

If you not already have, you can activate Superfetch. Start regedit, go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters", and edit the key EnableSuperFetch to have one of the values:
0: disabled
1: speed up applications
2: speed up boot
3: speed up both

Prefetching (preloading parts of a programm into RAM - which is a lot faster than your hard drive) works fine with Vista, just give it a little time.

Btw: A 7200rpm hard disk makes a lot difference overall. SSDs are still too expensive (you can get 1GB HDD for 30c whereas you need to pay 15$ for 1GB SLC SSD - MLC is a waste of money).