Sony VAIO SZ480-4GB of Ram, Super Slow For Me, Is it a Vista Issue ?

I moved from a 3 year old DELL to a brand new Sony SZ480. It has

Intel Code Due at 2GHz
4 GB of Ram
100GB 7.2K RPM Drive
And of course Vista

The Laptop for some reason is slower then my 3 year old DELL with XP. Here are few things I notice

1. When I boot up, it takes 2 Min 10 Sec to get to the log on screen. Once I log on, it takes 5 Min 35 Sec to bring the Laptop to usable stage (All the software get loaded).

2. Any time I access any thing with Hard Drive or Internet their is a pause. A lot of HD paging / thrashing



So I am trying to see what is going wrong ? Is it Vista ? Is it all the crap software Sony ships with the laptop or is it Norton / Symantec doing some thing ?

Thanks

Jay

 

It's hard to pinpoint what the problem is without more information. But It's not supposed to do that. Over 5 minutes to load the softwares at windows start is not normal.
What softwares are in your startup process?
Symantec/Norton isn't the culprit either.
Finally, what is the setting for your indexing? The indexing service might cause the high paging activity or pause.

 

OMG do a quick restore ASAP! Those are ridiculous load times. It takes me less than a minute to get it to usable time and I have an SZ430

 

It is weird. Mine (SZ210) has similar spec, but it runs much faster.

Intel Core Due 2.0GHz (upgraded)
4 GB of Ram
200GB 7.2K RPM Drive (7k200)
Vista Ultimate

Booting time takes about 30 sec (before getting to the log on screen)
There is no pause. Everything runs very fast.

Do the clean install or recovery.

 

"upgrade" to windows xp

 

You need to uninstall some of the software that came with the computer. Or if you can, do a clean install (need a Vista disk).

 

I tuend off the indexing funciton. Also turned off some services some prgrams were starting (Sykpe is a good example)....so now boot time to logon window is 1:35 and from log on to working state is 3.55.

I think still its high. Is thre are software that will tell me what get started in one order.

Jay

 

Thats still very high.
Even if you don't want to do a clean install you should try a reload from the restore partition in case something is corrupt.

 

all 32-bit OS including xp and vista does not handle 4gb memory.

 

Darn, I paid for 4 GB or Ram. System says 3197 (So 75%). Any ways I have been un installing one program after another as I cant do a brand new Vista install (then I have to move so much data back). Things are slowly improving, removing Symantec Antivirus seems to have stopped the disk thrashing issue

jay

 

Yea but still, shouldn't mean Vista will be slower with 2GB RAM than with 4GB no?

On a side-note..has anybody successfully managed to install Vista 64-bit on a Vaio? And found the drivers for this?

 

a 32-bit OS will recognize 3.2 gb of ram if I'm not mistaken.

Also, unfortunately, Sony computers are one of the most bloatware ridden computers in the industry, tons of trial software and other crap. These poor systems are loaded to the brim with crap. Doing a clean install or removing many trial programs yourself will help a LOT. You will see a significant difference.

If you can also get XP to run on it instead of Vista, that would help a lot too. You have a lot of room to improve and you can fortunately.

 

strongly suggest you backup your data, make a new partition, do a clean installation of vista.

my personal experience is, keep c as system/software drive and d for data. easy for system/data backup.

sorry, I know I do not answer your question.

 

No, it will not. 2GB is optimal. Above that you will only notice increased speed if you are actually using more than 2GB RAM (like Photoshop could).

With XP this optimal point is 1GB.

Fully agree.

 

denikin are you running Ultimate 64-bit or 32-bit?