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How do I make Vista *not* suck?
Aegeri
Tiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered User regular
Tiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered User regular
Firstly, I'll get aside the obvious: No, I don't think I can just format and put windows XP pro on my laptop. I'm currently *seriously* considering this if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can at the moment (various warranty and similar reasons you see).
So, for now assume I have to live with Vista (but I assure you, if I can weasel my way into a loophole or something to get rid of Vista *I will*) and can anyone tell me how to make it NOT suck terrible amounts of ass?
This is my system:
Dual Core Intel T7800 2.6ghz
Nividia Geforce 6800M GT 256meg (x2 in SLI)
2x 200 gig hard drives
4 gig DDR2 RAM
Windows Vista
Toshiba X200 17" Notebook.
Now, in applications where it is running say a game like Crysis, Supreme Commander or similar it runs brilliantly. This is not the issue. The issue is in everything else: It takes forever to install something, loading is often oddly delayed, it crashes games on startup trying to install random things (for example, Crysis is routinely crashed by a gamespy installing trying to install on startup for some reason, even though I never tell it to install anything) and such forth. The worst part is when it auto-updates it drags the system to a crawl and I can't play any games. This is an issue because when I'm at home and capped, I'm downloading at max at 9kb/s meaning it can knock my computer out of any gaming action for 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on what it is downloading. This might solve itself as I download all the updates or so, which it doesn't seem to do all at once (In other words, when I wasn't capped :x ).
So what can I do to improve Vista? Yes I know, obvious response "uninstall lol", but other than that are there settings or whatever else I can set that make the thing run faster? I'm getting increasingly exasperated with this, but it's going to be a massive amount of work reinstalling everything finding drivers for each component (I did not get these with the computer if you're wondering) and such forth.
Again, computer runs perfectly fine in applications like Crysis, Supreme Commander, Word and such forth. It's just the daily OS functions and such that are very slow (starting up, installing things etc). So what can I do?
So, for now assume I have to live with Vista (but I assure you, if I can weasel my way into a loophole or something to get rid of Vista *I will*) and can anyone tell me how to make it NOT suck terrible amounts of ass?
This is my system:
Dual Core Intel T7800 2.6ghz
Nividia Geforce 6800M GT 256meg (x2 in SLI)
2x 200 gig hard drives
4 gig DDR2 RAM
Windows Vista
Toshiba X200 17" Notebook.
Now, in applications where it is running say a game like Crysis, Supreme Commander or similar it runs brilliantly. This is not the issue. The issue is in everything else: It takes forever to install something, loading is often oddly delayed, it crashes games on startup trying to install random things (for example, Crysis is routinely crashed by a gamespy installing trying to install on startup for some reason, even though I never tell it to install anything) and such forth. The worst part is when it auto-updates it drags the system to a crawl and I can't play any games. This is an issue because when I'm at home and capped, I'm downloading at max at 9kb/s meaning it can knock my computer out of any gaming action for 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on what it is downloading. This might solve itself as I download all the updates or so, which it doesn't seem to do all at once (In other words, when I wasn't capped :x ).
So what can I do to improve Vista? Yes I know, obvious response "uninstall lol", but other than that are there settings or whatever else I can set that make the thing run faster? I'm getting increasingly exasperated with this, but it's going to be a massive amount of work reinstalling everything finding drivers for each component (I did not get these with the computer if you're wondering) and such forth.
Again, computer runs perfectly fine in applications like Crysis, Supreme Commander, Word and such forth. It's just the daily OS functions and such that are very slow (starting up, installing things etc). So what can I do?
Aegeri on
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Try some of the tweaks in this guide. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532
The first thing I did when I got my laptop is reinstalled Vista and ran through that guide. I can't say if it sped things up since I did it immediately and thus have nothing to compare it to, but its worth a shot.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
If your hard drive's are 5,400rpm with small caches then installing will be slow. Buy faster harddrives?
Uninstall everything that you don't use, e.g. my laptop came with about 5 different pieces of software for the webcam, yet the only thing I needed was the driver.
Run msconfig, go to the startup and prevent everything from loading that you don't use.
Learn to use the sleep state rather than turning your laptop on/off.
Actually, you have a laptop so I'm going to go ahead and assume it's full of all sorts of crapware and stupid setting choices so +1 to my reinstall.
Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time
"If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.
At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?
My instinct and experience says that even under these extreme circumstances, Windows Vista can be fixed. That’s why, for the past two months, Jeremy and I have been collaborating on an experiment. After he sent me his Vaio in early March, I blew away all traces of the old installation and set up a pristine copy of Windows Vista Business, with up-to-date drivers and zero crapware. (This screen shot, from the accompanying image gallery, shows the blizzard of dialog boxes and icons that are part of the original, unpleasant experience.) The initial results were eye-opening and impressive. After my makeover, this machine was every bit as fast as its specs said it should have been."
This helped me a lot with games. You don't necessarily have to get the newest video drivers, but get ones a couple of weeks/months old that have proven to be stable.
At any rate, I'm going to echo the reinstall Vista suggestion because my clean install that I did myself is every bit as fast as XP.
EDIT: On both my computer at home, which has always had Vista (So nothing to compare to really) and my work computer, which I recently upgraded to Vista and is an aging system (Only 1GB of RAM, works fine).
Vista gets better with time. It learns your habits and starts preloading stuff into RAM so stuff loads faster. It takes a while for all of the indexing to get done. Don't do anything drastic until you have had the computer a few weeks.
Unless you slapped those HD's in yourself it's very likely they are 5.4k RPM and a small cache which means total suckage.
Vista seems to handle slow HD's extremely badly. On my laptop I started out with a 5.4k and basically ruined my Vista install twice trying to multi-task installations/folder copying. The problem is further exacerbated if you try to do any of the former while doing Windows Update.
My first recommendation would be to just buy one high quality HD and try again.
Other than that you just need to be very careful about multi-tasking HD intensive operations and honestly the symptoms you are describing are exactly what happened to my laptop before the whole OS burned to the ground and I had to reinstall.
Installing XP is easy but depending on the age of your laptop you might have to change some BIOS settings to get the XP installer to recognize your drives.
*edit*, oh if it's blue screening you're fucked anyway, re-install Vista and run Windows Update alone, with nothing else running, not even a web browser. That's what caused my first install to deteriorate, the system would hang during updates and the system files got corrupted.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Other than that, I suppose it could be the HD. However, I've got a 3 year-old Motion Computing tablet PC running Vista Business x32 w/ 1 GB of RAM, and once it's booted up and loaded, it runs quite nicely. Application start time and functionality, including handwriting recognition, is great. Seriously, on a proper install, Vista really can work well, especially with the aforementioned preloading that Vista does.
I don't believe it - I'm on my THIRD PS3, and my FIRST XBOX360. What the heck?
This is not a good thing to do in Vista. Please tell me you did not turn off Super Fetch, if so turn it back on. If you want to disable services in Vista then please read BlackViper.com first.