XR5 slowing down

Hello everybody,

I have recently purchased an XR5 from PCMW (sager 9262) and I'm having issues with vista 64bits. My laptop slows down over time. Windows opening and application launching are very fast in the first few minutes but after about 1 hour or two my windows open a lot more slowly....
I have 8800m gtx and 167.44 stock drivers. I've tried to defrag the HD, registry, running less services, etc.. almost everything possible !! The only factor responsible seem to be the time...
Do somebody else experience this issue ?

I think it's strange since with quad core, 4gb ram etc....

Thanks a lot for answering me..

 

A Windows reinstall?

 

No..because I'm not an expert and I don't want to lose time reinstalling all my programs...unless I am sure it will help..
I have reduced some visual effects and it seems to be better so far..I will see...

Is it difficult to reinstall vista ? What's a clean install ?

Thank you very much for your answer "Fade to Black" !!

 

It's not difficult. You just insert the DVD and it's a peace of cake from that point onwards.

 

I assume this requires a format right Fade To Black? Or can Vista reinstall without format.

If so I may give this a try aswell. I just don't want to have to download everything over again, like all my Steam Games, and WoW. My internet isnt too fast.

 

You can install it without a format, but I don't recommend that. It's best to start from scratch. All the drivers are available at Sager's site for instance.
A format will wipe everything, so you should consider not installing games on Vista's partition.

 

Though don't some files always end up on the system partition when installing games/apps? Meaning If I put them on a seperate partition, the formatted the system drive, and reinstalled Vista, that the games would be missing certain files, or registry entries?

 

By judging from what you said, are you experiencing the same problem BMonk ?

 

I was. I think that Vista sp1 may have helped. But I am still seeing some issues with performance of some apps. Games run perfectly, even after being on for hours. Even when the system seems to slow down, games are still running very well. But my adobe master suite could use a boost for sure. I expect faster video rendering from premiere than I am getting.

 

It is good to know that games run great ! I didn't have enough time to try...I have bought CoH opposing fronts and World in conflict... I'm going to my military service soon and I hope I'll have time to play on the weekends ;-)

I don't have installed SP1 (I thought it wasn't released yet..) but I can say that by having disabled some visual effects of Vista it is a lot better now...

While on the subject of games, from your standpoint is it better to play with directx 9 or 10 ? Because I'm afraid that the frame rate won't be terribly high in dx10 ? However I should soon received the second 8800m gtx...

Best regards from Switzerland !

 

I dont believe any of my games play in dx10, so I have not tried. But it seems from what I have read, that 9 is still where its at, for performance/looks balance. Seems like dx10 still doesnt have enough improvments to outweigh its lack of framerate.

 

Ufoman,

Before re-installing and presumably re-formatting your drive (an option under Vista), go and examine the apps you have downloaded since receiving your notebook. Some are hogs...Also examine your precesses (under task manager) and see if you are running unneeded processes and kill those if any. Then lastly, check out your startup programs under start type msconfig/startups and see if anything is there that you don't really need and uncheck it (them).
Give a hard boot (shut down and start) and see if that goes away. Lastly, do a thorough deep virus scan while you're asleep. You may have gotten a bot or something...All this is quick and without the pain of a re-install.

 

Pardon me for butting in, but why a re-install? If nothing is wrong with your system, re-installing should be a last ditch option...

Try moving your games one at a time from your main disk to another, this will take a bit of time and all you'll have to do is re-create the shortcut so that it will point to the .exe in question...

I have done the same exact thing, moving Crysis, FEAR, Bioshock etc from my main C drive to an external large drive x7200 tethered via a e-SATA card. There is no perceptible delay and gaming is just as smooth.

It's better to rid oneself of the dead weight from the OS, as you so aptly said, some visual options, some unneeded services. I run Vista Ult x64 and have so far no problem either with drivers or apps. Vista makes provisions for 32 bit apps in \programfiesx86.

Bonne besogne et bonne chance.

 

This does not always work, but works with a lot of programs.

Like you said BMonk, you will be missing registry keys for all programs that you do not install using the installer for that program.

Copied/Moved programs will often not be detected by update programs and stuff like that. Some of them just plain don't work. Games are usually easier to move, Apps you will run into issues ( I think )

I don't recommend copying programs over in this way but if you are in a bind, it is certainly worth a shot.

My advice, get another PC, copy your entire harddrive over the network. Then do a fresh install, including a format, then copy everything back ( but into a single folder not just overwrite everything ) then slowly try and move programs around to see if they work or not.


This is, of course, a last resort. As Ogun said, most problems can be solved by getting rid of dead weight programs/processes.

Could be anything really, trojan, spyware, etc etc, something is eating memory and most likely can be terminated.

I run Adaware, spybot, and hijackthis to find any bad crap on my system but hijackthis requires a little bit more effort to get it to work but you can figure it out pretty easily.

 

If you want to improve your performance, above all, I would most highly recommend Koroush Ghazi's Vista tweak guide at http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

It's an amazing 200-page guide which guides you through pretty much everything Vista-related and many things you can do to improve performance. Below are some tips from that guide which I think might be a good start for solving your problems.

I'd definitely check out your potential for malware first by running at least 3 things:

- Ad aware
- AVG Antivirus
- A-Squared Free (make sure you download *free* version--it's tricky!!)

Also note, virus scanners themselves could cause a big problem, for example Norton basically takes over your system and can severely slow down games. AVG Free is pretty non-intrusive which is why I recommend it, but you can even do some tweaking with that for performance boosts.

Someone mentioned start-ups. MSConfig is nice for temporarily testing, but is not a permanent solution.

Instead, use Start-->Control Panel-->Windows Defender, and then go to Tools-->Software Explorer and check your startups from there.

Microsoft also has a nice utility called "Autoruns" for download, though I haven't tried that yet.

You could also try cleaning your registry out with some software referenced in the above-mentioned guide, but this is not to be taken lightly and I would be very careful doing so--I once accidentally deleted some things the app considered "useless" but eventually had to restore them.

Good luck!

EDIT: One more thing, you could also try typing "services.msc" into your search box to open the Services viewer. In addition to "startup programs" which we've already talked about, there are "startup services" which run even more in the background, ranging from Nvidia driver services to unneeded virus scan or Vista services. You can completely disable them, set them to automatically start on boot, or to only start when an application requests them. For example, I don't use ReadyBoost, so I went into "services.msc" and disabled "ReadyBoost" which I think used to be set to Automatic startup. Again, greater details in the guide I referenced--you do want to be careful with what you disable in Services.

 

Thank you for all your answers !

But I've done everything you've suggested... I definitely think it's not related to : spyware, services, startup programs, hard-drive, programs in general...
because if it was this my XR5 would be slow even just after rebooting...but it is not...very very fast for at least one hour...the only factor seems to be time...

the event viewer always report driver problem when I put my laptop into "sleep mode"...so maybe it's driver related...I will try to change my VGA driver from 167.44 to 167.43...and see if it's better

 

OK, so do you have all Vista updates?

 

I have changed my amount of virtual memory...and it's a lot better now... I have followed the guide someone suggested in a previous post (exceptionnal guide I must say !)
reduced my pagefile to 512 mo instead of 4 gig that is way to much... and put a fixed size too (min 512 max 512)

I have even try with NO pagefile at all and it seemed to run perfect too..but for safety reasons I stay with 512 mo...

Regards

 

Nice, I'm glad you found the guide useful! I'm kind of surprised that changing the pagefile did that--I wonder if before maybe you somehow had a highly-fragmented pagefile? Perhaps resetting it was all you needed.

 

How hot is your XR5 getting?

I know heat will slow down a computer quite a bit after startup, regardless of all the Vista reinstall crap.

 

Not hot it seems...The fans are mostly off
I don't think it is related...

regards !

 

So, I can officially say that I managed to solve this problem... but I don't know how I did it! The only thing I know is that after changing the energy option of the closing lid and after running the last version of tuneup utility the system doesn't show any decrease now (it was getting very slow after few hours while accessing the drives)...