VISTA laptop is so slow its crazy! Any ideas or help appreciated!! :(

Hi there,

I am having problems with my laptop, mainly due to its slowness, it must be bogged down with something taking up the processor but I have no idea what it - is, I'm assuming a large portion of it is VISTA but its getting ridiculously slow, so much so that vista is saying that programs are not responding.

Here is an example of what is causing problems:

• Laptop take AGES to boot up, a guess at the time would be about 10 minutes - when the screen goes black and flashes back again then things start to load, but there is a long period where the processor is working and nothing appears to be happening??
• 'my computer' and 'control panel' and 'explorer' type windows take the longest to load - over 50% of the time I cannot access control panel at all, it just freezes and opening files is very slow too
• switching between programs is very slow (via bottom toolbar or tabs)
• loading a new program takes a very long time (a guess at about 5 minutes) and this includes firefox, thunderbird email and any other packages such as MSN or MS Office etc etc...
• System will freeze when typing for no apparant reason (really spooky - it just did it!) and then I continue typing and the rest of the text appears really quickly - hope u know what i mean??
• Sounds are delayed, there is sometimes a delay in the sounds of 'events'

I have done all the steps in the malware section and dont think its a virus, I have the adware and spybot stuff all installed and it doesnt see any problems.

I have bought & installed a brand new copy of Kaspersky and Tune Up Utilities 2007 too.

This is my system spec, I will try to be as comprehensive as possible but please let me know if you need any more info:

• Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop
• Processor : i cant currently find this out as control panel is not responding - i have tried for 30 mins now and i cant get it to respond!! I believe it is a dual core 1.73ghz or something like that?
• Hard Drive: Same problem as above - I will add the detail after the post is complete and can access 'my computer' - From memory it is about 20gb?? not sure tho?
• OS: Windows Vista
• Oh - I give up - I cant access control panel or my computer - anything else i can do to get this info???

 

I have just got in to 'my computer' and the HDD is as follows:

C (OS): 54.8GB free of 99.7GB
D: (Recovery): 6.5GB free of 9.9GB

(I wasnt even close! LOL!)

 

ok, just got in to system properties via 'my computer' and the details are:

OS: Windows Vista Business
Processor: Intel T2080 @ 1.73GHZ
Memory: 1014 MB
System Type: 32-Bit Operating System

 

:wave here is a link to check out.

Basic computer maintenance

 

ok - thanks for the link, i will give it a go!

I remember tryin this before but fell at the first hurdle as i cant get into control panel

 

This thread contains links to Vista updates that are supposed to improve speed and reliability.

Do pay attention to WildWolf's link, though. The slowdown is most likely caused by programs adding themselves to the computers startup. Eliminating some may help.

It may also be worthwhile to review Blackviper's guide on configuring services in Windows Vista.

 

thank-you so much, my laptop has improved loads!!! Followed the disk cleanup links and the vista ones and glanced over the vista guide but this lot has taken me all afternoon so gonna stop for tonite!

I am not convinced that its still functioning on top form but it is a great improvement! Is there anything else that I can try at all?

THANKS SO MUCH! :wave you guys are fab!!

 

I am sorry. I do not have vista. 2 things you may want to check out. Processes running in the background. http://www.processlibrary.com/ . That may help. Also, run a check of what programs are starting with your computer.

A really good scan for virus and spyware in safemode is always a good idea and defrag your harddrive may help as well. To make sure you do a proper job of scanning for virus and such, I would suggest checking out that section here at major geeks. While I know the proper way to do it in Xp I can not offer you the proper information to do that with vista.

Vista does take quite a machine to run properly. Maybe partion your harddrive and install Xp on another partition? Just a thought.

 

Running 1014MB, not a gig of RAM (the missing MB are probably used by the video) may be part of the problem too.
Vista Business requirements:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
* WDDM Driver
* 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
* Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
* 32 bits per pixel

Do you have 128 MB of graphics memory?

 

Hi, thanks for this, how do I check this out??

 

Thanks - I will check out the processes, I have thought there are a lot running so will check out what are necessary!

 

cheers for that - i will check that out!!

 

we have a couple of customers running vista on laptops, we found having 2Gig minimum ram helped speed them up quite a lot.
and if you can afford it put 4Gig in it.

 

i'm gonna have to hold out on any payments on ram this side of xmas so mite wait until i can afford the 4gb - thanks for this!

 

thanks for the help, i have found some things that were loading on startup that aren't needed to be there, i.e. MSN, AVG (its uninstalled!), POWERISO, and A synaptics device icon.

This is a screenshot of how the startup looks now:



I think most of these are ok, any suggestions here?

I have also downloaded HDCleaner but cannot get it to run, seems to be a problem with it :s

I did go through all the basic cleanup stuff, it does seem to be improving! The biggest delay at the moment now seems to be from when the desktop appears to when the computer is actually functional, it seems to be doing a lot of 'behind the scenes' loading of stuff at this point, I will check out the vista startup stuff again!

 

AGH!!! I shouldnt have deleted the synaptics icon thing as now the scroll bars dont work on the mouse - how do i get it back!!

UPDATE: I've just had a look and I dont think the version of HDCleaner on this site is compatable with Vista, it comes up with an error message eventually saying that it is not the latest version and to visit the site to download the latest version - however the latest version available seems to run just fine but its only available in German at the moment so thats no good to me, guess I will be without that one then!