New Computer: Vista's Green Bar and Skip-Ridden Music Play

Glyph

After five years, I decided to get a new laptop. One that could actually run multiple applications with a much smoother performance. I eventually settled on the Toshiba Satellite A215-S5849.

• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 processor
• 200GB HDD
• 2GB of DDR2 memory
• ATI Radeon X1200 graphics, 319MB of shared video memory

Now I thought this would be enough to run the Vista operating system with which it came without incident. I was wrong. Now maybe it was because it was still using a 4200 rpm HDD but in my hubris and ignorance I figured the 200GB and 2GB RAM would make up for it. It didn't.

Probably one of the most blatant signs of slow performance is this green loading bar that comes up whenever I'm opening folders with a lot of files or large galleries in Windows Explorer. I heard this is only supposed to take maybe a second or two but for me the process can actually take up to a minute to finish. XP certainly didn't take that long to load thumbnails. AND music playback skips. Frequently. I already disabled Aero, what else can I file off or configure to make it so this system actually runs like it's supposed to?

Morskittar

How long have you been running it and do you have preinstalled antivirus running?

Neither of those are normal behavior.

Glyph

It's been a month since I bought it. It came with Norton but I uninstalled it and replaced it with NOD32.

The Deliverator

Honestly, I'd either chalk it up to the very slow HD, or something being legitimately broken. I run a laptop with very similar specs, and vista home premium. I don't have any problems like you describe at all. It runs a bit sluggish on battery power, but nothing stuttery or laggy.

Honestly, if you just bought the laptop I'd have it checked out right away under warranty. Sometimes you get a lemon, after all.

Daedalus

Sounds like chunks of Norton are still resident.

Or there's some other preinstalled crap you missed.

Glyph

I thought I'd taken care of most of the bloatware but maybe there was something I missed. I hope it's not a hardware problem but that's what it's starting to sound like. Thanks guys.

fightinfilipino

yeah, Norton/Symantec is pretty notorious for bad uninstalls. problems definitely crop up when two antivirus programs are still running together.

i'd hop over to symantec's website and look up the manual removal methods for whatever version of Norton was installed on your system.

Morskittar

Do you have SP1 installed? The green bar was an actual software issue before it.

Glyph

I thought Windows Update would've taken care of that. How do I check?

JohnDoe

With those specs, Vista should work quite well. Did you change any of the default indexing settings?

Glyph

I don't think so. How do I do that?

JohnDoe

Under Control Panel, System Maintenance, Indexing Options - Look at what folders are listed as being indexed. Are they the ones with large amount of thumbnails etc?

Glyph