OK, so I just got an awesome new laptop. This thing’s a 17" screamer. But the damn thing, which should be able to handle anything, chokes like a chihuahua eating chicken bones on Vista. Firefox is glacially slow. McAfee hangs at 18% on virus scans. A single DLL frequently demands 98% of processor power. The freaking TASK MANAGER makes the whole thing lock up.
Tonight, i think I’m nuking Vista (and getting rid of the goddamn bloatware Dell bundles on their machine) and resetting with XP.
I have a newish desktop with Vista and it’s light lightning.
I put Vista on my 2 year old 2 gigs of ram having laptop and it was quite fast (the exception being that one time I opened the Sims and Photoshop at the same time).
My brand new 4 gigs of ram having laptop has Vista and it never stalls on anything.
Does it only have 2gb of RAM? While that might be the minimum that Vista requires, I’ve found that it makes it very slow, just like you said. The desktop I bought a few months ago has 64-bit Vista and 8gb of RAM. It’s a thing of beauty. I can have all the settings on WoW turned up all the way and still pull almost 40 fps.
My advice is to nuke it and start over with Vista. It really is a good OS and it’s perfectly speedy, but Mac owners are correct in saying that PC vendors weigh down their machines with crap software. Like McAfee. With the UAC, I really don’t think antivirus software is even necessary.
So is McAfee a frequent culprit? I don’t have the new desktop with me at the mo’, so I’m going on memory here, but I believe it has a 2.20 GHz dual core processor, and 4GB of RAM.
Oh Christ, Dell? Is it an M6400? Because we’ve had the fucking devil of a time with one of those, and it’s not Microsoft’s fault. I’m a bit busy at the moment (okay, the football’s on :)), but I can send you some details later of what we did to get it a bit more stable.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware on DStudio 17 models - lord knows I’ve fixed a few of them at work, lately - but the bloatware and configuration that comes with the package chokes it something horrendously.
You’re better off with a fresh install of Vista than trying to remedy the situation manually. Trust me on this; I should know. With the latest Windows security package, there’s pretty much no need for a running anti-virus package, either. Get a load-only AV scanner - like the free AVG - and a Spyware remover and you’re pretty much set. Just do some stringent scans overnight once a forthnight and it’ll be alright, as long as you’re reasonably net savvy.
If you intend to use it for gaming or multi-tasked processes (video editing, heavy illustration work, etc) you’ll want a better RAM optimizer. I’ve been running CacheBooster for the last year, both at my home gaming computer as well as my video editing suite and I’m seeing a marked improvement. Not huge, granted, but a definite increase.
Other than that, just keep the amount of software that loads at startup to a bare minimum. Vista has troubles with getting over the initial “slog.”
Oh, and keep an eye on your power supply. If they’re the same model as I’m thinking of, they kind of skimped on the PSU. Haven’t had a warranty case at work yet (knock wood), but I’m pretty much just waiting for it.
Awesome. Thanks muchly for the help. One more question, if you don’t mind. Do I need to do the old FDISK thing to wipe and reinstall? Or just put the CD in the tray and tell it to rock?
Yeah, they come and go in quality; this time round, there seem to be a lot of driver issues. I think it may be because they’ve only recently refreshed their product line, but it’s not wildly impressive, I have to say. Gukumatz is right - ideally, you’d bung your own fresh install of Vista on there, and forget about all of Dell’s crap. If you can do this, I’d recommend it. However, since they’re reluctant to provide actual install media (as opposed to a recovery partition), this may not work for you, in which case I think uninstalling some of the supplied software is the best bet.
What got our machine working (and you’re right, it is a different model) was removing as many of Dell’s custom drivers as possible, and letting Vista go search for the default Microsoft ones. We found in particular that Dell Controlpoint hogged CPU and memory like you wouldn’t believe. It serves no useful function - get rid of it.
Also, and probably more importantly, the Realtek chipset drivers were unmitigated shod. The audio service would randomly take up full CPU (which might be what you’re seeing), and is no better than the MS driver. Removing the network adapters and letting Vista install standard Microsoft ones helped enormously. If your machine is anything like ours, you should find the network stuff under “Realtek” in the add/remove programs dialog, and the audio is called something like “IDT High-def audio”. Bear in mind that if you remove the network driver Windows won’t be able to connect to the internet if it needs to look there for a replacement driver, though. We got around this by uninstalling the LAN driver first, then the WiFi once the LAN was working again.
Incidentally, for working out what processes are clobbering your machine, I highly recommend replacing Task Manager with Process Explorer, part of a whole suite of nifty utilities called Sysinternals. It gives you waaay more information than the standard task manager. Also in the suite is something called “autoruns”, which is particularly helpful for disabling rubbish that starts when your computer boots, which can make a big difference to fresh boot performance. It’s the most useful 10 megabytes you’ll ever download.
Anyway, good luck with it.
Oh, on preview: no, you shouldn’t need to fdisk before reinstalling - the installer will ask you what partition you want to install on, and give you the option of reformatting it at that point. A quick format will do the job. There will almost certainly be a small second partition on the disk (Dell’s recovery partition). I’d advise leaving this alone, just in case things go disastrously wrong. You can always delete it later if you want.
Standard operating procedure for me is to wipe and reinstall from disc Any store bought pc. the crap they throw on systems should be friggin criminal. Would you pay for a car that came with a bunch of crappy parts that slowed it down, made it corner worse, messed with the brakes, and decreased gas mileage by 15%? hell no…but some how pc retailers get away with it.
