Is Vista Slow?

Hi folks,

Over the holiday period I have been working with a number of Vista installations. OK, nothing fancy, just setting up, wiring, finding drivers and that for the most part.

What I have noticed in most of these is that it seems rather slow by comparison to Win 2000 and XP. The strange thing to me at least is that this does not seem to be directly related to the hardware specification.

This really hit home when I was asked to help a friend with this new box. OK, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it is an e-machine with an AMD 64 dual core (2.1Gig), a Gig of some sort of DDR2 and a 7200rpm SATAII drive.

I was fixing his old machine which also has Vista Home Premium. Now this one ended up with 512Mb of PC3200 (DDR 400), has a Radeon 9250 (128Mb) video card, and a 7200rpm PATA drive. The processor is an Athlon single core (K7) running at 1.2Gig.

The old machine does seem quite a bit faster???????????? could it just be all that preloaded junk that you get on store bought computers these days?

The only real hardware difference I can see is that the new box has integrated graphics? Otherwise everything should be superior.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

Standard installation of Vista Home Premium 32bit (no customizing) has 150+ services on it.

Now, 90% of the stuff on that E-Machine probably uses some additional services, in addition to dashboards and junk..

The older machine with half the ram may have been slightly faster...

Video.

But honestly, its probably the difference of installation junk.

A clean install is going to run faster 100% of the time versus some department store image.

In vista there are alot of setting that are not on by defult like in device manager under the propertys of the harddrive there are advanced transfur setings that are not on buy defult that you may check .. in my experiance it helps alot .....

Well I've only used it on someone else's machine, and it wasn't a fast machine to begin with, so I would say it was slow. I refused to have it on my newest PCs. I ordered them with XP Pro.

The reason it might seem faster on an older machine is when Vista is installed it sets the "recommended" visual settings automatically. So if it sees you have a slower cpu and older gfx card it will not have as many visual settings enabled.

IMO vista is slow. I have tweaked vista before so it runs almost as fast as XP but I dont think I have go it to be the same yet.

They keep overtaking the plumbing more and more and all they end up doing is stopping up the drain. You have to admire that level of thick-headedness.

New machines come preloaded with all sorts of trial-ware (as can be seen by the dozen or so useless icons for the trials). Some of these are in the startup list. There are also several unnecessary services that automatically start up that might be better to set on manual. Ex: DFS Replication, Diagnostic Policy Service, IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules, IPsec Policy Agent, RtmRm for Distributed Transaction Coordinator, Offline Files, Remote Registry, Tablet PC Input Service, Windows Error Reporting Service. IMO those can be set to manual start. Also, ReadyBoost and Terminal Service are sometimes best to have as a delayed start instead of straight automatic start.

One thing I've heard but I'm not sure I believe is that currently Vista Home Premium uses a % of RAM instead of a specific amount, which when combined with integrated graphics pulling from the RAM for display can cause a machine to be quite sluggish. Again, just something I've heard and don't necessarily believe....I personally thought it simply needed a base of about 512mb.

Well my friend's laptop which is running Vista has 512 meg of RAM and it was slower than government. Unbelievable, just opening up a single browser window took forever. Granted, by today's standards that's a pittance of RAM, but you should be able to open a single browser window without waiting 20 seconds. Vista is a memory pig

512mb Ram on a Vista machine is like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with a 12hp lawnmower engine.

Its just not gonna happen.

Well, at least not well enough to use well.

With 3gb of Ram and a 256mb video card on my Vista machine I'm running 1.2 gb of ram in use. I have IE open.

Vista gets faster to use once it gets used to how you use your computer. Honestly.

(Note I didn't say how much faster... :D )

That's why I'm glad I didn't get it. I run high RAM use programs to begin with. If I had Vista, I'd need 4mb instead of 2.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by zallison

512mb Ram on a Vista machine is like trying to fly a Boeing 747 with a 12hp lawnmower engine.

Its just not gonna happen.

Well, at least not well enough to use well.

With 3gb of Ram and a 256mb video card on my Vista machine I'm running 1.2 gb of ram in use. I have IE open.

Vista gets faster to use once it gets used to how you use your computer. Honestly.

(Note I didn't say how much faster... :D )

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Heh. I giggled....a lot.

Well, my laptop is running on 1.60 GhZ AMD X2, 1GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 and Windows Vista Home Premium and while it's definitely fast and doesn't take forever to open a browser, it's definitely slower than XP would be under the same specs. Bootup time is where I notice the most significant difference from XP and Vista.