My mom’s machine has a gig of ram, a 1.6 gig processor and yet runs more slowly than my crap machine with a 750 processor and 300 od kilobytes of ram. I immediately suspected spyware (and am downloading Spybot S&D as I type) but mom says the SpySweeper installed by the geeksquad is doing the job.
Second, when I try to run the games I brought, I get the message that the dos window won’t run in full screen mode. The window then closes.
I could also used any general tips in dealing with Vista. I’m used to XP and ME.
I would fire up Task Manager (same way you do for XP - Ctrl-Alt-Del) and see 1) how loaded the CPU is, and 2) how much memory is being used.
If either of these are not close to 0 with no applications running, take a look at the Processes tab and see what’s running. You can sort by CPU and see what’s using most of the CPU. With no applications running, you should see 90+% “System Idle Process”.
From what you describe, there’s no real reason for the computer to run slow (Vista isn’t inherently slower than XP in my experience). So if the computer is slow, something is sucking up the resources (CPU and/or memory).
Vista should have 2GB of ram to be really happy and if thats like a 1.6Ghz celeron mobile, its a little underpowered for vista.
ALOT of underpowered laptops got loaded with vista when it first came out. Vista does require a beefier machine to run as quickly as xp, it draws more memory and more processor power in overhead than XP ever did.
That said, the price of DDR2 Ram is falling like a stone. Picking up another 1-2GB of ram for moms machine can be done for around $50 and can be installed by a novice with minimal fuss.
If sluggish interface is the issue as opposed to application unresponsiveness (which may be a low memory issue or a very low powered CPU, or a process running in the background) it might be an underpowered GPU. Try turning Vista Aero off: right click the desktop and go to personalize, then window and color appearance, Then classic appearance window and choose Vista basic.
Also, if it’s a desktop, try turning off CPU throttling by going to the power options and setting the CPU power to 100% minimum and 100% maximum.
Run msconfig and see if there are any applications loading up at startup that you cna do without.
Only responding to one point: the “DOS” (scare quotes in case someone takes issue with me calling it that) window won’t run full screen under Vista.
I’ve read various ways to hack this, and they all sounded more trouble than they were worth. I ended up using some DOS emulator to run ancient 16-bit programs.
I would recommend getting more RAM - a 2 GiB stick like this one here is only $20, and should work with that laptop (nearly every laptop out there with Vista factory installed is using DDR2).
My advice for running older DOS games in Vista (and for that matter, XP, Linux, OS X, BSD, OS/2, & BeOS) would be to use DOSBox, a DOS emulator designed specially to play older games.
I put AVG on it… Errrrrr… slowed to a halt. I found with AVG if you disable the auto update and link scanner and email scanner, it runs swift. Put any of that back on and errrr grind to a slow halt.
So it’s for me it was definately the virus protection that killed me.
I don’t download anything, so I just don’t auto sign in to AVG and I update AVG daily and run a scan once a week.
You may like to try out Process Lasso. I find it useful since certain programs became problematic processor hogs with their latest versions. The software is free for personal use.