Topic Make Vista Liveable with a Laptop

rebelagent

Ok Vista is killing me I just got it with the my new Inspiron 1501 about 3-4 months ago and it lags. It turns on fast but turning it off is incredibly agonizing. To have to wait for the updates then to think about shutting down.

I should probably upgrade my memory since I have a AMD 64x2 1.6ghz turion
Memory says 894mb but its 1gb mem.

Anything else i should do to speed up my work day? I usually run Adobe Photoshop CS on here. Then sometimes I run multiple windows such as my email, my server, an edit page, and notepad...and it starts lagging really bad. On my PC i have no problem.

I regularly use CCleaner to clear cache and other issues. I use AVG Free to scan for viruses. Yet it still lags my laptop...my computer is just fine...is it just what i get for using a laptop? Is there a way to fix this up

-HAL-

Switch back to XP..

I haven't tested Vista much, but it's pretty memory hungry so the first thing I would do was to upgrade to 2Gb memory and see if it works better then...

mmarsh

Your problem is easy, you are running Photoshop CS on a VISTA machine, and you only have less than 1 GIG RAM available. Thats like a snail pulling a turtle in wet concrete. Both VISTA and Photoshop have huge Memory appetites.

You need more RAM. 1 GIG is just not enough you need 2 GIGS and 4 GIGS if you are running the 64-bit version.

(Don't bother with 4GIGS if you are using the 32bit version as 32bit OS's are capped at 2 GIGS).

Incidentally I think your RAM chip might be bad you shouldn't have 894mb available. Its true you lose alittle because of formating (done by the factory during fabrication) but yours is over a 10% loss. I would complain to Dell. This is usually the case when the PC manufacture uses a cheap knockoff chip, or its a chip that somehow escaped the QA process.

You are still going to need the extra RAM however. Make sure you get a DECENT RAM provider.
For laptops I like CRUCIAL because the chips are tested before sold. If I were you I would make sure to get a double pack (2x1 GIG) because the 2 RAM chips are tested together.

Samsung isn't bad either.

johnblack

Win x32 supports 2.8GB but you can make some changes in win xp x32 for it to support 3GB

Speed up Vista by turning eye candies off. or even better option: Install XP! =)

l00ky

The best thing for you would be to install Windows XP on your laptop because you`d get better performances.You`ll need to search a little for drivers but i assure you the it will worth and you`ll see the differences.

AlexKall

I actually have better performance with Vista on my laptop then with XP, it's blazing fast with all eye candy on and with 1 GB ram Actually happaly supprised with Vista

-HAL-

Vista works fine on my laptop as well (except for the slow file copy process), but the tests I've found online for the exact same laptop states that 3DMark 06 runs around 20% faster on XP..

senojekips

You guys are just trying to spoil my day.

I have only recently taken up Vista bashing as a serious pastime, and here we have people saying that in some circumstances it's OK.

Ahhh well,... it still looks awful, too washed out. Us old geezers need something to whinge about.

MontyB

As with every microsoft OS I will wait for the next one.
In general I only adopt every second release I think Win98 was my exception where I used both Win95 and 98 but assuming the next OS is about 2 years away I will wait for it.