[ketanco]

Hi,

I have two computer speed related questions:

I have a Intel Core2duo 1.8 Ghz laptop, I just bought it few months ago, which operates with Vista. But from the start, it was always slower than my previous pentium 4 which operated with XP. My new laptop is working even slower recently.

1-Other than cleaning up space in the hard drive, uninstalling unused programs, cleaning temp internet files, and disk defragmentation is there anything else in general that I should do to speed things up? It is slow all the time, both internet and opening word excel etc...

2-Also, is Vista Causing my computer to be slow as it needs more resources than XP? If I downgraded to Windows XP, would that make my computer much faster versus operating with Vista?
Thanks

[link590o]

there are a few various things to take into account.

for any machine, vista is a tough thing to run if you don't have the right hardware. 2 gigs of RAM, a decent SATA hard drive, a decent video card, and a fast dual core are needed to run any form of vista in all it's glory at a decent speed.

however, vista is said to stabilize given enough time to run. aside from what you've done, there isn't anything else you can do except upgrade the RAM if at all possible.

there is another option though. here's an idea for you if you have 1 gig of RAM or less...and if you have a flash drive...did you know that vista included an option that would allow you to use your flash drive like additional ram? if you plug it in, it allows you to choose whether you want it to be mass storage or that special type of RAM. and it dedicates it to the OS completely so that you can free up your normal RAM and video RAM. kind of cool.

but then there's the other option...downgrading will almost always speed things up. vista requires massive resources, so using something that doesn't require anywhere near as much to run will definitely do the trick.


but i never saw vista as something that was laptop worthy. despite that, i have seen a few laptops that ran vista decently. desktops however are far more powerful than any laptop could ever be, and so i think vista would be more suited for that kind of a machine.

so from here you have two choices:

upgrade whatever you can and give it a chance and a little time and allow it to prove itself.

or, downgrade and stick with XP.

it's really up to you. but obviously you needed that little tidbit of information first.

i'm only asking you to give vista a chance because they didn't make it the successor of XP for nothing. a lot of small intricacies are built in that make it better than xp in a lot of ways.

[ketanco]

Thanks for the response, real good insight to the problem and solution options. How can I check if I have a flash drive, and are you able to tell me the steps to make it like an additional RAM as you describe?

[Carbon]

The ReadyBoost thing was shown in benchmarks to be next to useless. Upgrade your RAM if you're getting slow-ness.

From what I have seen, XP and Vista are actually about the same performance-wise, especially with Aero etc off. Of course, this is on my desktop, so I may be biased, but I have found little memory-usage difference.