[Green Beryl]

Hey all,

I'm trying to help an elderly friend out with his new laptop. He's had it for a few months and it's slowed to all but a complete standstill. It takes longer than 15 minutes to start up completely; you're lucky if it will switch between windows under thirty seconds and programs take from three to five minutes to start (if they do decide to start at all). No error messages. He got it with Vista already installed, so the laptop can handle the operating system.

I've already removed all the unneeded programs from starting up, stopped all unnecessary services and defragged. I've run Crap Cleaner, Adaware, Spybot and Spyware Terminator and removed the relatively minor problems they managed to find.

When I check the Task Manager, nothing but the bare necessities are running and the CPU usage is usually around 7% when the computer is just sitting, although the Physical memory is 99%.

I'm not familiar enough with Vista to know where to find the system's specs, and it's too frustratingly slow to spend too much time looking.

I've done a little research on the net and have read about possible bad drivers or something hanging up the system, but I'm not sure how to check for, and identify, a 'bad driver'. In any case, it is only possible drivers from a printer and a scanner he has hooked up that didn't come with the original system.

Also, I don't have the battery in the laptop and I'm running it straight from the main power. Could that effect things?

I'd really appreciate some guidance; I'm not sure what else to try.

[DaveA]

Is the a NEW machine or one that has been upgraded to Vista?

If new machine I would get with the OEM!

[dodge_viper]

how much memory have u got? did u check wat is taking so much of RAM from task manager?

[Green Beryl]

Thanks for all the replies, but I persevered and after more than a day on the internet researching, I managed to familiarise myself with a good part of Vista and its services. I was able to cut down those running in the background to almost half. It took me a long time to notice that Task Manager wasn't set to show processes running from all users (as it is by default on my machine, running XP). Once I changed that, it was clear what was slowing the machine down. I also uninstalled his current firewall and replaced it with a less system-hungry one and the startup time almost halved again.

All in all, it's still not perfect, the machine could benefit from some more RAM, I think. But, now I've had a chance to play around with Vista, it doesn't appear to be the complete disaster I was led to believe.

DaveA, there's only one laptop. It came with Vista installed when he got it several months ago.

dodge_viper, I can't remember how much RAM he ended up having (not enough, really).

[ibo]

Yeah, I know about Vista, eh. Everyone says it's so bad and it sucks. I don't think so - Never had a problem. I can even say it runs smoother than XP Pro and you can really feel the Duo Core.

[Green Beryl]

I think, primarily, it is a case of there are a lot of subtle differences to get used to. Aside from that, there are some issues I have with it. And I don't doubt there is a hoard of more subtle problems to do with security, stability and processing requirements when you begin to look at the operating system in depth - something I'm not particularly interested in. But most of all, it just doesn't feel like the revolution XP was - to me, anyway.

[DaveA]

"uninstalled his current firewall and replaced it with a less system-hungry one "

What did you remove and what did you install?

[ibo]

I don't criticize XP. I'm not saying Vista is much better than XP. May be it's just too many people that don't like the changes.