Win vista, comp stalling, wits end

Hello there,

I recently purchased a laptop:
(Satellite A305D-S6851),
Windows Vista
250g hd,
AMD Turion x2 dual core mobile processors,
3GB pc6400 SDRAM

To be honest, I'm not positive what all of that means but from my meager experience of buying computers, the specs didn't sound too bad.

I play online mmorpg's so I was hoping to get a computer that could handle them with the graphics relatively cranked. However, when I logged in the first time to Warhammer it seemed a bit slow even at the max framerate setting. So, with a lot of discussion with others I decided to replace Vista with XP. When I tried to do that, I got some BSOD error, called tech support and was told that it is basically impossible to use xp on this computer as the drivers will not be compatible with anything but Vista. Fine, I stopped trying and the next day, something else happened. I closed my laptop and walked away while still logged in to this game. When I came back the computer was locked up and I had to ctrl-alt-del/task manager to exit and restart.

Now, when I turn the comp on it is extremely slow. It takes no lie about 7 minutes from the time that I hit the on button until the hour-glass stops moving after bootup. Once it gets booted and I click on something, internet explorer, for example, it takes about 4-8 minutes for the program to finish loading the home page. This happens for just about every program. I have turned off everything from the start-up menu so that shouldn't be an issue at this point; however, I don't know if I 'need' any of it on or not.

Please help. At this point, I'm about ready to send the computer back for a new hard drive or something but would rather fix it if possible.

Thank you so much!

 

Go through this. Cheers...
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/5c59f8c1-b0d1-4f1a-af55-74f3922f3f351033.mspx

 

It's possible that you may have turned on a Vista feature that is to do with the way Vista interacts with some router/modems. If the router is not compatible it can cause this.

Log an as an administrator
type CMD into the run box, clicking yes to continue if needed
typein the black screen which opens

netsh interface tcp show global

If you see a line which reads

Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : Normal

Typein

set global autotuning=disabled

hit enter

typin

exit, hit enter

Does this help?

 

Thank you for the replies! So far, I went to the CMD prompt and for the:
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level:

Mine says highlyrestricted. What's that mean and do I need to change it?

I went through startup repair and my computer said that it couldn't fix the error.

 

I ran the registry mechanic and it found 685 errors, then I realized that I need to pay $30.00 in order to clean it. Is there a free version?

 

Yes disable it (in Vista).

This is a new capability that is only of use if your modem/router can play ball. Most can't.

I am a bit concerned about the failed attempt to 'downgrade' to XP, tell us exactly what happened (how far you got) in case you have wiped out any important Vista files. In particular did you start to format any partitions?
Let us know about this before you start playing with registry editors or fixit programs.

If this has happened you will have to reinstall Vista, from the recovery partition or DVD.

So save your data and be prepared to start again if my procedure does not help.

Then perhaps some gamer will help with Warhammer in the games forum.

 

First of all, thank you so very much for helping me with this!!
Can you please tell me exactly what I need to type to disable it? Do I need to do that to both wireless computers? I have a brand new router Belkin N Wireless so I'm not sure why it shouldn't have the utmost capabilities. I'm perfectly fine with disabling it though; however, just an added note, I have been experiencing the router dropping for some reason and all of the recycling of it and the modem won't make it come back. It's less than two months old and I have had to call Belkin 3 times to get them to help me reset everything to square one.

When I went to downgrade to XP, I put in a disk that I got from my Dell a few years ago WinXP SP 2. I'll try to remember what happened exactly here:
I booted from CD and the computer started looking at the files and it had a bar at the bottom of the screen. I hadn't gotten to the part where it wiped the hard drive yet, it was still looking at the files when I got the blue screen that said there was some sort of error and that it could not proceed with the install (or something like that). So, I exited and came back in to Vista. At that point, the comp was extremely slow.

So, I called Toshiba and they simply told me to perform a recovery with the disk. (Please keep in mine the computer is less than 2 months old as well). After the recovery the system was still very slow so I called them again and they said that I needed to continue to perform the recovery until it fixed the problem or performed it 3 times with no success. If I did it 3 times and it still wasn't fixed then they could exchange it. I can't help but think, however, that there's something on my end that I could do. I'm not sure what I did to mess it up but I must have, I can't imagine that there's something broken with it being so new.

 

From post #4

It's not irrevocable, the reverse command is (suprise) enable.

Is everthing going slow or just the network/internet?

 

Oh ok, I did read the reply there before; the equals sign just looked odd to me; so, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't some command that I should be familiar with and know what it is supposed to look like. Also, I had asked if I need to do this with both computers.

Everything is going slow. Like I was saying, the router keeps going out every 3rd day or so if it lasts that long and as for the computer, it takes forever to shut down, to load up upon startup and once started for it to stop doing whatever it's doing to access anything. After the desktop comes up and I click on an icon, I have to wait about 5 minutes or so for it to actually open the program. Then, there are times when it seems to stall... I'll be working on something and then it will lock up for about a minute or so then stop lagging and I can continue working, then about 2-3 minutes later it will lag again for a minute or so. It will continue this for a few minutes and then be back to this dysfunctional 'normal'.

 

The equals sign is not the normal mathematical equality. It is called in programming an asignment operator and tells the system to asign (set) the value enabled or diabled to the parameter 'auto-tuning'.

It is only valid in Vista.

If the problem also occurs with another, non Vista pc it may be that you have a failing connection or router, or its mains adapter - I've seen a few of these this winter as a result of overheating or mmains disruptions.

However if you had not said that your problems started with an attempt to downgrade to XP I would have guessed you had some sort of malware. Everything else you describe are classic symptoms.

It would certainly be worth heading over to the malware forum and doing the read and runme first.