Toshiba Satellite x205-s9349 Slow

Hi

I recently bought a new Toshiba Satellite x205-s9349 with the following specifications:

-Intel Duo Core T7100 At 1.8GHz
-Vista Home Premium
-Nvidia 8700m GT with 256mb Dedicated
-4Gbs of ram
-2x120gb Harddrives

Here is the problem:

When i bought the computer it was all gravy, everything was good, i could run the following games:

-Assassin's Creed (Max Details)
-Gears of War
-Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
-Crysis (Medium Details)
-Unreal Tournament 3 (Max Details)

but then i realised the laptop monitor had a dead pixel so i returned the laptop to the people i bought it from immediately and they replaced it and offered to switch my hard drive around.

So i waited and this new one came, but unfortunately it seems to be slower by quite a bit in terms of game performance compared to the other one i had. I even read tweaking guides on this forum and did some of those to increase performance but it didn't work. I also updated my graphics driver but i don't think it installed properly. I defraged the harddrive and also used Crap Cleaner but still nothing

Games like Assassin's Creed lags lots even when the detail is turned down but before it would be fine on high, Crysis is a NIGHTMARE, Call of Duty runs alrightish but not ideal and Gears of War is laggy.

Also, the start menu is VERY slow, i have to wait 2 secs when i click on a folder in the start menu before it expands and my CPU usage goes really high when that happens. The CPU seems to be working very hard even when the computer is idle.

Here are photos of the Processes running, Cpu performance, Laptop Specs and Graphics adapter's specs:




Can someone please help me increase the performance of this laptop?

Thanks in advanced

 

Is the Power Options set to Performance mode?

Having it on Balanced or Power Saver limits the juice that gets to the CPU and GPU greatly decreasing performance

 

Yes, it is on high performance mode.
It was the first think i checked lol.

 

Umm it's weird that even the start menu is slow.. That happends to me only when i uninstall drivers (prior to an driver update)... I don't know, update your drivers (uninstall old ones, run a driver cleaner, and then install new ones)... Use one of the 174.xx series at www.laptopvideo2go.com... I'm using the 174.12 and they are nice...

 

I'm giving up hope and i think I'll just reinstall Windows Vista and dual boot Windows XP, one OS on eash harddrive.

Could someone possibly point me in the right direction?

I couldn't find drivers for this laptop on Toshiba's website and is there anything i need to know before i reinstall Windows for this laptop?

Edit;
i reinstalled vista and it seems to have done the trick
the drivers were on the american toshiba site btw, for the people who need them

 

After you reinstalled Vista it solved your problem ?

 

it performs better and i saw this thread today, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=253153 and it is true, my ratings are lower than before. will this actually boost me ratings and if so, does it actually increase the performance of my laptop?

 

Yes it will Anyway it did in my case.

And about this bad performance, I had the same issue before, and it was problem with realtek hd audio driver. In the future when you are checking what eats your CPU, just click a "Show process of all users" checkbox on the bottom of Task Manager window. It will allow you to see also system processes.

Regards,
L.

 

Yup lol, Value Added Package did the job, my CPU usage isn't skyrocketing for no reason anymore and it boosted my ratings.

Also thanks for the task manager tip and i had to reinstall vista to get it running nice and fast again, bit of a pain but it's worth it

thanks

 

It's always nice to help

Lu.

 

another find, to people with this problem.
Stwor is right about the Value Added Package, it does boost your performance rating and makes your computer faster but it also wrecked my power saver mode. with this package installed i had the slow problem i was experiencing at the beginning, so just install and uninstall the package and you'll be fine.