Why is Vista so s-l-o-w on my XPS M170? - Page 2

Vista is much snappier on my M1710 than XP. Networking hauls ass now.

Driver are still a little flaky, but nothing is holding me back from doing my job.

Complain, Complain, complain. Did you know there are at least more than 10 different builds of Vista before RTM was released? I got to play with all of them for what I'm doing. No doubt about it, you need at least 2 gigs of ram to run at a comfortable level. I've installed build: 5742 and it was slow on a P4 2.4 with only 1 gig of ram. Same computer and I just installed RTM and it's definitely an improvement on speed and functionality. I've installed RTM on an A22 Ibm thinkpad,(PIII, 512megs of ram) and guess what? It actually runs pretty decent. I checked the resources and there were at least 45 processes running and it still ran fine, loaded office 2007 and it still ran decent. So, YES, it does matter which version you are using. There are at least a dozen different builds for Vista Ultimate. Single core, dual core, doesn't matter. Which version are people installing? I've said too much. Hey Todd if you want PM me and I can try and help you out.

So this is the final build? I had major network connection issues with wireless and my cisco vpn client with RC2 i believe it was. It got to the point where i could never even connect to the internet! and so i haven't even put that 60gb drive back into my xps gen2. I want to buy the full version so i can put it on a couple machines here at my house, but i really dont want to deal with communications issues. Also, the RC i was using was pretty slow, like if you had newdotnet installed or something similar!!! LOL. .. but this was my formatted old hard drive, so there would be no spyware.

Hopefully the rtm version is a lot better. i've heard it is, so i've got my fingers crossed.

OH yeah. i believe i downloaded or copied to a cd and installed the latest cisco vpn drivers for vista that i got through TAC and it still didn't help.

To the OP; When Vista is first installed, the first 3 days (for me anyways) were like you described. That was mostly due to indexing and super-fetch (Vista's new pre-fetch scheme) being built from scratch and it takes that long to complete.

After that, things should get a lot better and more responsive. Also, major changes like huge files being put on and deleted off the hard drive will bring on all this again to a somewhat lesser degree than initial.

Also, the version you have makes a difference (whether Beta, RC or Final). Personally I found little difference between RC2 and Final as far as performance goes, but a huge difference to RC1 and earlier builds.

So far IMO Vista rocks. I don't miss XP. It does everything that XP did only it’s more intuitive (once you get used to it, after all, we've been using XP for 5years!), faster, more secure and a hell of a lot prettier. Yes, it does use more than twice the RAM as XP and it's running many more processes than my XP did, but somehow it seems to manage and utilise memory way better than XP as everything is snappy, programs load faster etc...

And you're going to be shocked to find out that I'm running it on a 4 1/2 year old Dell P4 2.26 with 1GB RAM (don't laugh). I cannot wait to get a new machine that will show off Vista even more.

I'm no MSFT fan by any means but I got to say kudos to them on Vista. They really do deserve it IMO.

this is what i know.
i am running vista RC2 and am having no problems. its not slow at all and i have no preformance issues.
here are my specs on my notebook which i've had for over a year now.
inspiron 9300 (2gig and its not dual core either), 2gig ram, nvidia go 6800,100gig hard drive

no sluggish behaviour, i can play all the dvds i have without any problems. the only thing is that having the sidebar open uses up like 10megs of ram but apart from that, the OS is snappy and i'm pleased with it. definately better than xp.

i have used media center at the same time as opening office and media monkey while copying 3gig of files form an exrternal hard drive and opening firefox, and then opening my music folder and testing out the searching all at the same time. all together no performance slowdowns or anything.

We use enterprise edition at work and Ive got to say its slow but nothing you wouldnt expect from GUI heavy OS thats trying to visually succeed its predecessor ya know? I mean come on who didnt think XP was (to me still is) slower compared to Win98Se?

The bottom line is that Vista is a bloated OS. I've was a Beta tester for it (testing mainly laptop features, go figure ) and while it's gotten much better since the innitial public Beta 2 release, its still bloated.

While alot of it can be pruned and removed from the OS, alot of it is still there.

Probably the biggest issue right now is driver support (or lack thereof). Once drivers get better (and they will, it will just take some time) everything will smooth out. I just feel sorry for the people who will rush out on midnight of the 30th to get Vista and install it to be "the first". Those people are, in essence, paying Beta-Testers.



It works the same with Office. Office is (alongside Norton's products) the biggest, most bloated pile of **** I've seen in a long time. It gets worse and worse with each release, and, alot like many other products out there, due to programmer's laziness. Being a programmer, I know that it's quite easy to bloat software, and it's sadly become a "trend" lately. This is why I recommend OpenOffice over M$ Office. Because it's much leaner, and it does everything that M$ Office can do just peachy...




Bottom line, just avoid Vista for the time being and let the bugs get worked out a bit.

I tend ot disagree...I have found Office 2007 to be a much more productive product than 2003...and most of my work colegues have agreed....we do a lot of documents in word excel etc and it really has improved productivity.

I too was a Vista Beta tester from the start. I'm running Ultimate now, and will NEVER go back to XP.
If you don't want a bloated OS, don't buy Vista Ultimate, buy a lesser version that has less "features".

What, in your opinion is bloating Vista? I'm just curious...

Word and Excel yes... Outlook 2007... NOPE!!! I had to uninstall Office 2007 and put 2003 back on but did that work... NOPE... had to reinstall my whole system to get rid of the 2007 leftovers.
Outlook 2007 has problems handling large pst and ost files. What is MS's solution... archive. Works fine with 2003 and not 2007. Talk about going backwards. Everytime there was a send & receive my whole system would freeze until it was done with it's process

Hopefully everything will run happily after the first service packs which is the typical MS process. Wouldn't it be nice if MS listened to the beta testers better and put out stronger first releases. Oh well... nothin is perfect on first release

Well in the beta version the OS was filled with debugging code which made it run like a dog for me, now the RTM code has been released it really fly's for me. Just click and its instant unlike before with the beta xp was quicker.
Im back to XP tho, not enough compatible software for what i want is available.

Vista has its place for now... I have a nice dual core notebook and I must say that Vista smokes XP on every front so far. I am using a 2GB SDCard, and that by itself has practically doubled the responsiveness of the OS. Sure, there are bugs. There will be bugs for a while. Vista works flawlessly by itself, but when you start installing programs that were written for XP, thats where Vista starts losing its performance ground. Software companies are working fiendishly to get products out for the Vista brand. Right now, most software gets angry when Vista starts asking the user for permission to do things... Vista does not allow programs to make potentially malicious changes without some user input first. This is a good thing, and I continue to have no problem clicking the allow button once in a while. Some programs that install driver level additions to the service list have issues working currently (such as Rivatuner..) because the OS doesn't want programs to have direct access to the services controls. Once companies recode their apps to work with the UAC functions and learn to work with the OS things will be much better than they are now.

Yes, Vista is a memory hog... but for a good reason. Right now, Vista is using 50% of my system RAM or 512MB. All but 16MB of whats left is cached RAM waiting to be used by the OS. I have opened up many intensive apps, and noticed no matter what I did, Vista always found enough memory to complete the job. This OS wants to make the best use of ALL the RAM in your system... so it uses what it needs to make things efficient, and then puts a hold on whats left so that it can manage it better. Fact is... Vista needs 512MB of my 1GB to maximize performance on my machine. If I were to install 2GBs, you can bet that Vista will use 1GB or more for itself. The more OS functions it can store in physical RAM, the faster the system will be able to respond to your input. So even though it looks like your RAM is all gone, Vista knows what to do with it to make your experience better.

In the end, I have to agree that Vista smokes a clean XP install from the get go for me. I have used Vista Ultimate for the last 30 days or so now, and have had no appreciable drop in system performance. If this were XP, I would already be getting cranky about how slow it was starting to become. I enjoy how Vista seems to adapt to every change I make. The networking features absolutely BLOW XP OUT OF THE WATER! If there is an error in the network, it tells me where the problem is. If I connect to a wireless network, I know within seconds if I will have internet access or not (little globe icon shows up over the networked pcs in the taskbar) My dial up cell phone connection is even more stable now, and I have fewer dropped connections.

The newest Forceware drivers are awesome, for those of you having video display issues. Try installing them ASAP. They are the Forceware X drivers (100 series) and are much more Vista friendly. They can be had at this link here... http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/nvidia...0030_vista.exe

The version is 100.30, and so far they work tons better than every driver before them. Even ATITool works with these now.

Ok, thats all for now. Don't knock it unless you have put it through all its loops. You can't be so quick to jump to conclusions about a new OS... people did it with XP too, saying the same thing that the Vista naysayers are chanting about now. XP did turn out to be an improvement over the prior OS's. Given time, I think Vista will do exactly the same.

That may be true, but for someone that just needs to work on a Word document or an occasional Excel and PowerPoint document (like 95% of the users that buy Office). No one can honestly sit and tell me that Office isn't a bloated pile of **** compared to OpenOffice. Sure, M$ Office has its advantages over OpenOffice, but M$ Office's disadvantages outweigh its advantages compared to OpenOffice.

As far as the Vista bloat? All of the crap that M$ seems to think needs to be going all of the time. Much of it can be disabled, sure. But it can't be denied that the bloat in Vista goes WAY beyond the bloat in Windows XP.

Wow! I didn't expect so many opposing views on Vista. I'll be the first one to admit I have no idea which one is better. One thing I am confused about Krayziepop is you said the you had a 2 GigSD card and it made all of the difference in the world when it came to performance. Does Vista store data that it needs on the SDcards for quicker data access? Also, I am happy to hear that the networking is much better than XP. That will definately be one less headache for me. Thanks everyone for the responces!

Do we have to sit and tell you or can we stand

I suppose if you REALLY have to, you can stand ...

Its called ReadyBoost. Its a disk caching technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readyboost

My very first install of Vista did that too... I would just reinstall it and you should be fine... I figured it was an install glitch. My vista install SMOKES my old XP install.

Oh YEAH!!!! ReadyBoost... I bought a 2gb 150x SD Card and did this. My 1710 screamed before, now I have to worry about getting a ticket, this thing is so damn fast...

I have done it under x64 Vista too... If you have only used 32bit, you havent seen nothing yet...

That's really neat!! Thanks for the info everyone!