[mark2123]

Hi, this is my first post having just joined the forum, so hi to everyone first of all.

My problem, which I do not understand, is that I have a 3.4Gig Processor and 1Gig of Ram, I also have installe, fairly recently, Windows Vista Premium - but, my computer appears to be very very slow in everything it does and spends just about all its time writing to or reading from the hard-drive (80Gig) - this is what appears to be making it slow.

Games that used to run ok seem to trundle along now and even opening up an Internet browser takes forever - surely Vista cannot be solely responsible for this nightmare which is making everything so tedious?

I have a scheduled defrag and disk clean every week and ran it again today to see if it makes any difference. Well, just as I am sat here typing this, the computer hard-drive is whirring away keeping busy, even though I don't think there is anything it should beed to be doing.

Final piece of info - there is very little in the start-up list i.e. background activities as I switched them all off, so there is no excuse for the contant disk access that I can think of.

I hope someone is able to shed some light on this. If the answer is to uninstall Vista and go back to XP, I'm not sure how to do that because I didn't get an XP disk with my computer, it is on the hard-drive as a back-up somewhere.

Regards,

Mark.

[Wolfeymole]

Hello Mark

Welcome to TCF

Did you get the 32 bit or the 64 bit version?
Also, did you have XP on the machine to start with?
Vista can be one massive resource hugger.
More details on your pc specs please.

[mark2123]

Hi Wolfey.

I did get the 64 bit version and XP was previously installed yes. I think I'd like to revert to it, but don't have any CD or anything as it was held as a backup folder somewhere on the hard drive - I think I've found it on a separate drive (partition) but all the folders are locked and I cant do anything with them.

Mark.

[mark2123]

Correction - I have the 32 bit system on as I just checked my properties.

Mark.

[Hybr!d]

When i first changed over to vista it was very slow, this was down to having problems with my display and sound drivers.

Even though they were meant for vista and installed correctly they caused the PC to be slow as hell.

Open up task manager and post your CPU and RAM usage %.

Have you installed the latest sound and video drivers?

You can do so by doing a windows update or going to the manufacturers website.

Nvidia cards in particular have problems with Vista.

This is assuming you did a fresh install and don't have a virus or any spy-ware on the PC.

[Wolfeymole]

It sounds to me like all that is remaining of XP is a Recovery partition and without a full on XP reinstallation disk your snookered.
1 gig of ram is a base minimum for premium so it may be that what's letting you down.
More on that here.

[Hybr!d]

Welcome to the forums too...

[alex]

Hey Mark, welcome to TCF.

Vista, as Wolfie states, is more of a resource hog than XP ever was.

The constant hdd usage is because Vista is running out of ram to fulfill it's tasks, so is using the hdd storage as dynamic ram. This is called a swapfile.

I'd strongly recommend an extra gb of ram to alleviate the problem.

[mark2123]

Hi People and thanks for the advice.

I am about to go and buy some more memory and will report back later. Regards,

Mark.

[alex]

You're welcome Mark, that's what we're here for.

Yeah, do post back and let us know how it's gone.

cheers.