Question for Vista users

In My Humble Opinion
1

Please humor me on this one and answer the following:

  1. CPU (type and speed)
  2. GPU (integrated or discrete)
  3. RAM (amount)
  4. When you play the included Chess Titans game on level 5 does the computer decide its next move (shown by a rotating hourglass) almost instantly or does it take a few second?
2

Pentium D 3.4, Geforce 8600 GTS, 2GB and it takes a few seconds, at least to start with.

3

AMD 4600+ (Dual core), intergrated (Nvida 6150), 2GB, 2-3 seconds. I don’t really play chess, but I think I was just beaten in record time.

4

Intel T7500 (Core2Duo 2.2Ghz), 2 Gig of ram, discrete GPU.

It takes a few seconds (1-3).

5
  1. Intel P4 3.0 Ghz HT
  2. ATI X600
  3. 2 Gigs Ram
  4. Never played the chess game. I’m not at home to test it, either. But my system runs pretty well after a recent format/reinstall.
6
  1. Intel Quadcore 2.4 Ghz
  2. GeForce 8800 GT
  3. 3 GB RAM (PC 5300)
  4. Takes a few seconds - maybe a fast 3 count, or a 1-mississippi.
7
  1. Intel E6750 (Core 2 Duo)
  2. GeForce 8800 GT
  3. 2GB Crucial Ballistix
  4. About 1-3 seconds at the start.
8

Well that settles it. Thanks everyone.

I asked because I have a brand new 2.2ghz core 2 duo with a good video card and plenty of ram and its been running pretty slow, especially when browsing webpages on my school’s network. Except one day at school while I was playing Chess Titans I noticed the hourglass sped up rapidly and the computer was taking no time at all to figure out its moves. I opened up firefox and sure enough the web was working really well too. It stayed that way for a couple of minutes and then everything went back to its plodding normal self.

I wanted to find out if that fast hourglass was an anomaly or if it was actually supposed to be like that. But, if BlackKnight’s system isn’t making instantaneous moves I can’t imagine one that would. Which makes the whole thing all the more curious.

I told the tech support people at Lenovo about it and the unanimous advice was downgrade to XP. Not sure what I’m gonna do.

9

Press Control-Alt-Escape, click on the Process Tab, and click the CPU column twice. That will tell you what process is eating CPU. Or the puter may be busy with I/O tasks, that will slow things down too.

10

I’ve got a very similar box to elfkin, and I can’t get past level 2 on the damned thing anyway. Stupid chess.

11
  1. Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor E6420 (2.13GHz)
  2. 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT, TV-out, DVI-I, HDMI
  3. 4GB DDR2-667MHz dual channel SDRAM (4x1024)
  4. Mostly it just shits itself and begs me for a draw.
12

I’m not sure whether you were looking for advice or just a poll, but my WAG would be that figuring out it’s next move at chess would be purely a CPU function, and probably wouldn’t require much in terms of RAM or GPU resources. Also a WAG, but I doubt the number of CPU cores would matter.

control-z’s advice is going to be the easiest way to figure out what’s slowing it down. I’m an XP guy, so I don’t know if it works the same way on Vista, but I’d like to mention that there may be a checkbox on the Task Manager (or whatever it’s called now) that says something like “Show processes from all users” that you’ll want to have checked to get the full picture (in case it’s some kind of system service that’s eating all your CPU).