I'm probably reopening a whole debate, but I've just had to turn off EVERY graphical feature on Vista, to get my laptop running at a reasonable speed. This morning, for example, it took 6 minutes to open the Fox. After this change, I now feel like I'm back on 95! It's totally bringing back happy memories! I'm not gonna go into detail, despite currently learning about this in Uni . However, all the stuff behind the virtual machine interfacing, is obviously working a little differently, but the looks, the feel, the delightfully drab greyness, all of it... it's so Win95! :eusa_danc (!)
Vista runs perfectly on my laptop with full settings. What are the specs of your laptop? One thing most people forget with laptops running vista is you really really need to get the latest drivers for your video card, since th default vista ones are horrible.
Horrendous. It cost £300, and the extra RAM I ordered won't clip into place so I'm still on 512. I'm gonna have to get my ex-pro-computer-guy mate to have a look at it. But it bears pointing out that Vista was shipped with this laptop, despite the fact that running the simplest of Vista performance tasks with it will immediately determine it really isn't up to the task. I would much prefer Windows XP - but of course, I'm now running basically something that's taking up the processing time of 95! I'm an outspoken opponent of the many bells and whistles of Vista. Luckily, they're easy to turn off. One of the best things Microsoft have done here, is to make it so if you don't like it, you can basically turn it into Windows 95 with a couple of clicks. The amount it helps with the graphics is immense.
If you don't like Vista then either go back to XP or wait around for Windows 7. Since Vista came out it isn't even that expensive to buy XP anymore. Plus with the laptop thing it could be that the laptop has minimum system requirements and not recommended or better. I think technically all Vista needs to run is 512 RAM. So quit your complaining and either go back or stick with what you have degraded yourself to and wait for W7 which is being billed as the anti-Vista for people like you that can't be bothered to learn a new OS so all you do is complain.
Personally, I thought that comment was really mean. I have been on Vista for about 2 months now, and I must say, a lot of the features are either just annoying for people who have any computer knowledge. One thing that always got me from XP to Vista is now, every time ANYTHING happens on the computer, it asks for your permission to do so. It will ask you if you "really want to open" a program every time you open it. It can be really annoying. Another point that I really don't like about Vista is the RAM requirement for it. Seriously, 512 RAM just for it to install on a system, its ridiculous. If im correct, XP only really needs 128mb of RAM to work, so it's taking most of your RAM just to run. Also, the compatibility issues with Vista right now are horrible. Half the games online need you to use backwards compatibility to work. Just my 2 cents on Vista : /
I had Vista on my new laptop for a couple months before downgrading to XP. Overall I didn't have anything major against it, just small things. The only BSOD's I got were when I started Virtualbox (open source quality!), and my machine would hard freeze occasionally when running Daemon tools. Overall I like the new graphical theme, but I don't like the memory usage. Disabling Aero and just going for Vista basic saves a lot of memory, and interestingly Aero uses MORE memory when you have more applications open (and would like extra memory) since it caches images of the programs for quick flip. Supposedly just disabling transparencies speeds things up. The only thing I don't like about the new theme is the close button, being red and twice as big wide as the others. For some reason looking at it annoys me. Otherwise I think vista is very pretty. Not that it matters, I just went back to Classic (just like XP) and disabled the theme service to save more resources. I might try some of the Aero like addons for XP. I really like the start menu search bar and that was the only thing I missed going back to XP. I found a close replacement, launchy: http://www.launchy.net/ Something stupid that annoyed me was the lack of an included WinHlp32.exe file. Sure you can download it, but a number of legacy applications still use it. Meanwhile vista actually includes the terrible command line text editor Edlin. I was glad when EDIT came out. it made Edlin obsolete... SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO!!!!!! Why is it there but not WinHlp32.exe? Oddly enough it still includes SIXTEEN-BIT winhelp.exe. I know right out of the box there's a lot of disk trashing due to various indexing and prefetch services. Supposedly this is supposed to die down and improve performance more than being disabled once everything's indexed. I disabled it anyways. The slow speed of installing updated "Please wait while configuring updates" annoyed me. Once during a class, in the middle of a presentation, the professor's laptop suddenly shutdown to install an update. Taking 5-10 minutes before the machine was usable again. UAC isn't as bad as some people make it out to be. Certainly no worse than sudo and graphical equivalents under Linux. Not to mention that it addresses one of the main inherent security issues with Windows. By far, the number one annoyance with Vista, that drove me up the wall was the "flashing" of the screen. 30 seconds or a minute after logging in, the screen would flash black, then come back, and suddenly the cursor will be in the middle of the screen, even if it was elsewhere. The machine also does this after unlocking the machine. I lock and unlock the machine a lot as I come and go, so this happens a lot. I've seen this happen on every Vista machine I've used. I've read some things suggesting it was UAC. Disabling that didn't resolve it. Seriously... WTF? The other reason I uninstalled vista was because I didn't know where 40GB of my hard drive went.
I'm downgrading to xp tomoro from vista. My laptop runs at a reasonable speed with it, but my understanding is that it's going to run at hell faster speed on xp, cos it only takes up like half the space in the RAM, or something like that. I dont use any of the bells and whistles in vista, and a couple of the programs i have dont work properly on vista. Yes, theres probably a way to run them on vista, but its so much easier on xp cos it works straight away
XP doesn't work "straight away" on new computers, since 7 year old operating systems don't include device drivers for new computers. Get all drivers for your hardware together ahead of time and all on a CD or USB drive. Make sure you have a SP2 install disc otherwise you won't have support for >137GB hard drives Have IDE compatibility mode enabled in the BIOS, or SATA drivers on a floppy (and a usb floppy drive), or SATA drivers slipstreamed into the install disk. And if your machine didn't come with restore discs, make them before removing vista.
My tech-head friend is doing it for me, and he knows what he's doing...thanks for the tips tho And when I said "straight away" I was talking about nearly all programs that are on the market/downloadable being able to installed on xp quickly and easily, whereas a few of the programs that I have dont easily work on vista. Sorry about myy crap grammar/spelling but Ive had a really long day
What anti-virus software are you using? If it's Norton 360 or Norton Internet Security then that will account for a lot of the performance issues. With plenty of RAM it is OK (although personally I think Norton products are crap) but with Vista and 512MB there's no chance. A ram upgrade or dumping Norton and going for something lighter like NOD32 (which you need to pay for) or AVG Free (free but doesn't detect adware/spyware) should improve things considerably. You need more RAM anyway. 1GB is reasonable for Vista if you are just doing email, web, word processing etc. If you're pushing it harder, such as video editing or gaming, then 2GB or more is needed. My laptop is running Vista Home Premium with 1GB of RAM and a Centrino Duo CPU (about 1.8GHz I think) and it is fine with Aero enabled. It is mostly used for lightweight stuff. The only things that slow it a bit are Dreamweaver and PhotoShop Elements. I use NOD32 anti-virus.
Grow up. I know other OSs. I'm a goddamn computer science student, where my module head for Computer Systems is Alan Clements, one of the leading figures in IEEE, and writer of one of the defining international texts on the subject. I know what I'm talking about. My university uses Vista. I use it for compatibility reasons, so I can do homework and coursework for Algorithms and Data Structures at home. If you say that I could do it perfectly well on Linux/Ubuntu/whatever, then I'll have to point out the students I know who failed because they hadn't checked their programming work for compatibility issues. My complaint was that it was slowing it down. Indeed, it was as much advice as anything - if you truly are poor, like me right now, and can't afford a top of the range laptop (this lump set me back £300, and is in fact now £279), there are ways to make Vista work. It won't be half as pretty, but it'll work. So, onwards. Kenko's issue is indeed an annoyance. I wonder why that happens, the screen flickering thing. It seems to refresh the monitor after everything has loaded. :-/ Weird. I haven't the foggiest what I'm using as Antivirus software, actually. I'll have to check up on that. I used to use the fantastic Active Virus Shield by Kaspersky/AOL, but that became paid software. No good now. Hm. I'll have a look, thanks for the advice Paul! Hadn't even occurred to me that my Virus stuff might be slowing me down. As for the RAM, that's an odd thing, actually. I've got a stick of RAM. I've got a slot. I know where the RAM goes. It's made for HP computers, by HP. I've got a HP computer. Yet, despite all this, it still doesn't fit in properly, and hence the computer can't use it. Both me and my brother (who built his current computer from parts) can't put the thing in, so I'm gonna have to get my mate Bob (6 years industry experience, haha) to see what on earth we could be doing wrong.
This attitude is unhelpful and is not welcome on EC. Please moderate the tone of your posts in future. Thanks.
My friend's grandma has Vista on a laptop. I hadn't quite looked at the specs but I'd imagine they're pretty unsuitable for running it. I don't really like the graphical features either. Some are nice, but it takes a while to get used to finding things - and I like to be able to use things right away (I'm impatient like that. ). And if anything, you can download skins for XP that makes it look like Vista (pretty brief, I ain't looked at it myself yet) so you can practically have Vista with the utility of XP. Wonderful! Myself, I would never get Vista really. I like XP, and if I wanted a new OS I'd learn Linux for being able to do ANYTHING you want with it. I dunno what you were thinking about getting Vista on a £300 laptop but downgrading to XP is probably the best option! (Sorry if this post sounds pretty dumb, I'm not as knowledgeable in computers as I think. I'm left quite in the dark usually so yeah... I still stick with XP>Vista though. )
If the laptop's got less than 1Gb of RAM, then don't even try it on full specs. But I bought that much, it's just that half of it was bought as another part of the order, and now doesn't seem to fit. Also, the system came with Vista installed. I don't have the XP disks lying around, and such. And, like I said, I'd better get used to it - it's what I use at University. Compatibility is important for me. Linux has its good points, and maybe I'm biased - everything I do on it is hideously complicated - the subjects I learn that need linux are ridiculously hard. Formal Methods, Programming Paradigms, Language Systems, all horrible. As for the graphics, I've got them turned off now. Quite easy to do really, and it's totally saved this laptop. It's brilliant. And no, it's not particularly dumb. I'm working towards a degree in Computer Science, but what I learn is very specialist, so I can't really see many problems with your post.
Machines of that spec normally come with Vista Home Basic which doesn't have the Aero interface and does run adequately in 512MB (my sister's daughter's Medion laptop is like that). I think Vista Home Basic leaves out a lot of the stuff you have turned off anyway, so you've got yourself to about the same point. The Aero graphics are OK if the graphics chipset handles them. But if the graphics chipset is more basic the CPU has to deal with it instead, which hits the performance. I suspect this is what's going on with yours (especially since it isn't a dual-core CPU). Aero is just eye-candy anyway and you can work fine without it. Those gadgets down the right side of the screen are just a waste of time and are better gone too. Turning off the animation effects always makes it feel more responsive (that's one of the first things I do with Vista and XP). I still think you got a bargain with that laptop, and now you've got it running nicely you're sorted!
That, I do agree with. However, the games I play are Baldur's Gate II and Diablo II, because I'm retro-cool . I admittedly play a couple of others, but some are on my Megadrive (I repeat, I'm retro-cool) and one is on my housemate's Xbox 360 - which I have as much access to as I want, because he stuck it in the communal living room. I can't play Orange Box, but my laptop - with or without Vista - can't match the minimum specs anyway. I got Orange Box for christmas, incidentally, which is why I mention that specifically.
