slowwww vista...

I recently bought Dell's Inspiron 6400 which brought Windows Vista Home Premium with it. The processor is supposed to be fine for what I need the computer, but I find it much slower than my previous stolen laptop (also Dell). The Internet Explorer freezes now and then and I can't install some programs for molecular analysis I used in my previous computer. I checked and in iddle state, it has 71 processes running (compared with around 20 I had with the XP) and uses 50% of the RAM.
Is it my new laptop, which is not good? (it has a T5200 @ 1 GHz processor) Should I downgrade to XP again?

 

It's not @1GHZ.It uses speedstep [reducing the clocks when no CPU power is needed].When under load it hits 1.6GHz.
How much RAM do you have ?
Have you tried uninstalling the bloatware[useless preinstalled stuff]?

 

You may find that your problem clears if you turn off the eye candy. (On the Welcome Center, select "Show More Details" in the top right corner, then on the System page select "Advanced system settings" under the task list. Give yourself permission to proceed, click on the Settings button under performance , then under Visual effects select Adjust for best performance. I then select the Smooth edges of screen fonts and apply.)

You may well find that this clears your problem.

John

 

Thank you for your replies. It has 1GB ram.

Sorry John, how do I access the welcome center?

 

Just do a search

Start Menu
Search 'welcome center'

 

During the first few days Vista will be very slow as it is doing the superfetch and indexing. Give it roughly a week and it should smoothen things out.

by the way these are a few links to speed up Vista. (google more on "Speed Up Windows Vista) http://freshapps.blogspot.com/2007/04/speed-up-windows-vista.html
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Somehow after these and the 1 week + of usage it will be as smooth as silk. I've had Vista for about 10 days now.

 

^ Yup that's also true You can see if its finished with its Indexing the system, by looking at the 'Indexing Options' under Control Panel.

Just a note, why does it take so long like 10+ second to open my Control Panel link under START menu??

 

You should also uninstall the bloatware Dell preloads onto your computer.

 

an extra gb of ram would probally resolve your issue.
But if that isn't possible then yeah what everyone else said would probally work.

 

I tried removing all bloatware, and still found it kinda slow. Since removing programs still leaves crap in the registry and some shared dlls, etc.

So I wiped the HD clean, resized C: partition so that it is a more even split (80GB C: and 70GB D . I didn't touch the MediaDirect partition. Then reloaded the Vista using provided Dell DVD, reloaded all new versions of drivers. Reloaded only software that I wanted. And now the thing starts up and shuts down fast, everything within Vista also runs quite fast now. Although I only usually hibernate for faster startups and reboot once in awhile.

Vista almost requires 2GB as a perfect amount of RAM, anything less and it will act uncivilized.

 

running 1.5gb ram on a beatup old emachines - vista just flies

cheers ...

 

I just purchased a Inspiron 6400 with core duo 1.73/2 gigs of ram. And yes at first It was slow as poop. I found myself still using my old XP. After I dug into vista and removed the dell bloatware and ran some tweaks, Its alot faster. So much faster, I just sold my old XP. Maybe its the 2 gigs of ram.