[alexh1]

Hi,

I installed Vista on a brand new machine with Core Duo 2.4G, 2G DDRII, PCIe 16 video card and SATA II HD.

At work I have an HP machine with 3G Pentium 4 running XP for comparison.

When I installed Vista + Office I was thoroughly impressed with the speed. When I started internet explorer, it just popped onto the screen and even my DSL internet access seemed 4x faster. By comparison it seemed about twice as fast as my work machine.

Now that I have installed a few more things, it seems like a real dog. Basically doing anything brings up the hourglass for a few seconds. I re-ran the Windows performance score thingy and it reports the same values as before so the hardware has not changed. I suspect it's mostly Live Onecare slowing it down. I have also installed the Google toolbar.

Perhaps it's just the nature of the beast but it bothers me that I spent all this money on hardware yet my computer seems to be a real dog.

[cuttlefish]

I'm putting my money on Spyware!!!

http://www.lavasoft.de/products/ad_aware_free.php

Download this free version of Ad-Aware and see what it finds.................

The free version doesn't provide "real time monitoring" so you have to run the scan each day to clean any spyware out.

The paid version stops the spyware stuff getting in in the first place but the free one is OK for starters.

Also worth having a look at Task Manager (CTL ALT DEL will get that for you) - click on the heading tab marked CPU (twice) and it will sort the "load" in a decreasing order for you. Have a squiz and see if something is hogging the resources. You should typically see the "system idle process" in excess of 75-90%.

Do likewise on the memory tab and see if there is a memory hog there somewhere.

For something else to do, go to:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

and click on the "free scan" thingo.......................... does a pretty good job for a freebie!

[alexh1]

Jeez, I thought the whole point of Vista is that it's more secure!

-Update, I ran Spybot and it didn't find anything. There's nothing taking up any CPU resources in Task manager at idle.

It may just be all of the anti-spyware or the Vista GUI is just slow. I turned off Live OneCare and that didn't make any difference either.

[wilson44512]

did you try that Ad-Aware cuttlefish suggested? maybe it has something to do with what ever you installed on it? how many processes you have running?

[Jakbrud]

i would also turn off services you don't need or use
http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm

[uhaligani]

Have a look in Msconfig at the startup progs. Quite a lot of software (Like acrobat reader) puts an entry here, In most cases it is not needed. Acrobat, for example, works perfectly well without being included in the startup progs. If you have an ATI card, with the CCC installed, that can also slow things down a bit. I have no use for the CCC options and have disabled it. It made an enormous difference to my startup time.

[Bob Cerelli]

"Now that I have installed a few more things, it seems like a real dog."

And there is the likely solution to the problem. What did you install?

[alexh1]

Thanks all,

I experimented with disabling various startup progs and disabling all the non-essential stuff helped quite a bit.

One thing that's a litle strange is that there are 2 googletoolbarnotifiers in startup and I can only disable one of them (the second one always comes back on it's own).