Upgraded Z70v to Vista.... any ideas/tips? (Uses lots of CPU?)

Doesn't Vista have a built-in system performance analyzer that tells you exactly the bottlenecking component in your system; use that to decide which components need upgrading.

-Tom

You should post your Windows Experience Index (WEI) here and it will help. Also what is your hard drive?

Yes most likely the cause is the lack of ram, meaning your cpu is being taxed more. After a couple of seconds, the cpu usage on my new vista installation is between 1-4%, so its not vista thats causing the excess cpu usage. I doubt u have a virus already, so just wait the memory upgrade out and let us know what happens after.

512mb of ram is the minium required to run the OS, but it is always good to have as much as possible. If you have 2 SODIMM slots then try to get 2gb's in there (this will be a major performance increase, for a lappy anyway), that is assuming that you lappy can see the full 2gb. Make sure it is high speed and low latency ram (it cost an extra 20 and the performance differences between the 2 is noticable)

As for tweaks, i don't realy know (getting vista in a few weeks...), but in XP i found that running msconfig (start -> run -> type "msconfig"), and stoping services that i do not use, and getting ride of any bloatware (so it wont start up with the computer) helps with boot times and performance.

As for drivers, only get your sound card driver from Asus, get your video card, network etc etc from the makers (eg. if you have a x1600 goto Ati for the driver).

As the Pentium M is a 5hit chip in terms of performance (although it is good for battery life), this could be one of the reasons why you are finding ther performance lacking in vista. As i recall the minimum is a 1ghz P4.

While it's true that Pentium M CPUs aren't up to today's dual core CPUs, a 1.73 Ghz P-M will still be able to run the OS fine (just using a higher percentage of the CPU). A 1.73 Ghz Pentium M compares with a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4, which is plenty capable and way above minimum specs.

I noticed that it may be the hcontrol app (the one that runs the little shortcut buttons for bluetooth and wireless). Open up the task manager - is HControl using up all the CPU cycles? Uninstall that stuff - I couldn't figure out if it was the one from Microsoft or Asus . . . nether worked correctly.

All in all though, I was unimpressed with Vista - it is slower, no ifs ands or buts. I've gone back to XP - maybe I'll go to vista in a year.

How does a lack of RAM make the CPU work harder? It'll make you wait (a lot!) for swapping, but depending on how Windows measures processor usage, it might actually decrease the CPU load since more processes are going to be waiting on data rather than doing stuff with it.

CPU load only matters if:

1) Other processes don't get enough juice. Fire up Winamp's visualizations or something, and then see (in the equivalent of Task Manager or Unix top) how close to 100% of the CPU Winamp's getting. If the OS doing random stuff is slowing down your other processes, you have a problem.

2) Your CPU at minimum frequency (800MHz for yours, I believe) can't keep up. You don't want your OS to push your machine out of the bottom P-state on battery.


The excessive CPU use of Vista may be an indication that it's bloated and inefficient, but load numbers are nothing to worry about unless there's some larger problem.

okay, More ram makes the CPU opperate more efficently, and can see improvments of anyway from nothing to 50% depending on the make and model etc etc. However in some proccessors too much ram will actually cause performance drops.

It is because the ram makes the CPU opperate more effeceintly that the CPU load drops, by you resoning my old P-100 (a Petuim, 100mhz) should be able to run vista fine as it's CPU load will have dropped, this is clearly no the case (uness i overclocked it a masive 800%, which is clearly not happening).

The main reason for this is that it would have trouble finishing the jobs allocated to the CPU. It would finally get all the data loaded and then it would recive another inturupt telling it to 'tick' the system clock. adventually it would just crash.

the minimum for vista is 800mhz x86 or x64 computer so it should be fine although it will be a little laggy

bLAKE

You didn't understand what I said.

A 100MHz processor would not be able to run Vista because the processor itself would be the limiting factor, regardless of RAM. It would be at 100% load most of the time and still unable to get things done in time.

If you claim that "more RAM makes the CPU operate more efficiently", please let us all know how. The only possibility is that occasionally the OS has a choice between an algorithm that requires lots of memory, and one that requires lots of CPU... and is able to pick the one requiring lots of memory if there is extra. This is unlikely, however.

To reiterate: more RAM does improve the performance of a system, but it has very little to do with the CPU load or the CPU at all. Having sufficient RAM doesn't improve performance by reducing how often you have to wait on the CPU; it reduces how often you have to wait on the disk (and, while you're waiting on the disk, the CPU has no work to do). More RAM "makes the CPU more efficient" simply by not making it wait on work to do.

I'm not claiming that having less RAM makes a system perform better. I'm claiming that, if the poster is seeing high CPU load numbers, those are probably not due to a lack of RAM.

Try this. Edit a very large image in Photoshop/the GIMP, then open about fifty tabs in Firefox. You're putting enormous RAM demands on your system by doing this. By then alt-tabbing from firefox back to your image, you're creating a low-RAM situation and forcing your system to load the image back into RAM from swap.

Note that the CPU, during this process, sits mostly idle and probably at the minimum P-state. This is because there's nothing to do; everything's waiting on the image to get loaded back from swap. Not enough RAM, again, impacts performance because you're waiting on the disk, not on the CPU.

This fellow, however, has a problem with CPU use. If he meant "excessive swapping", he would have said that... unless he's confused about terms like CPU and swap and really meant "excessive swapping". Original poster, this isn't true, right?

Also, original poster: what process is using all of those CPU cycles? Your Dothan 1.73 is plenty fast.