system running slowly in general

Here's the situation: I recently purchased a new Lenovo N200 laptop for
college. this computer has a core 2 duo processor and a gig of RAM. it's
running sluggishly for having these specs, taking upwards of a half a minute
to open any window or program. I tried removing start-up programs, running
disk cleanup, doing disk defragmentations, and removing programs that i wont
use. My sidebar gadget that gauges my ram use still sits constantly at above
60% and the computer is slow as ever. I have called Lonovo tech support and
they said that the problem wasnt the computer; the problem was that vista is
a slow operating system and if i were running XP my computer would be flying.
Am i being jerked around by Lenovo or are other people having this problem?
Please give suggestions, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Open Device Manager (its in the Control Panel) and then
right-click on your hard drive (under Disk Drives). Click
on "Policies" and make sure there are check marks next to
"Optimize for Performance", "Enable write caching on
the disk", and "Enable advanced performance", then click OK.

You might also consider installing another 1GB of RAM.
Visit: http://www.crucial.com/index.aspx?&pid=1316453
and click on the Crucial Memory Advisor Tool.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User

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"DANtheMAN" wrote:

Here's the situation: I recently purchased a new Lenovo N200 laptop for
college. this computer has a core 2 duo processor and a gig of RAM. it's
running sluggishly for having these specs, taking upwards of a half a minute
to open any window or program. I tried removing start-up programs, running
disk cleanup, doing disk defragmentations, and removing programs that i wont
use. My sidebar gadget that gauges my ram use still sits constantly at above
60% and the computer is slow as ever. I have called Lonovo tech support and
they said that the problem wasnt the computer; the problem was that vista is
a slow operating system and if i were running XP my computer would be flying.
Am i being jerked around by Lenovo or are other people having this problem?
Please give suggestions, any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

DANtheMAN [Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:00:01 -0700] wrote:

>Here's the situation: I recently purchased a new Lenovo N200 laptop for
>college. this computer has a core 2 duo processor and a gig of RAM. it's
>running sluggishly for having these specs, taking upwards of a half a minute
>to open any window or program. I tried removing start-up programs, running
>disk cleanup, doing disk defragmentations, and removing programs that i wont
>use. My sidebar gadget that gauges my ram use still sits constantly at above
>60% and the computer is slow as ever. I have called Lonovo tech support and
>they said that the problem wasnt the computer; the problem was that vista is
>a slow operating system and if i were running XP my computer would be flying.
>Am i being jerked around by Lenovo or are other people having this problem?
>Please give suggestions, any help would be appreciated.
>Thanks!

Are you running anti-virus software on your laptop?
If so, turn it off completely and check whether that makes a difference
in speed.

Marco

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:00:01 -0700, DANtheMAN
<> wrote:

>Here's the situation: I recently purchased a new Lenovo N200 laptop for
>college. this computer has a core 2 duo processor and a gig of RAM. it's
>running sluggishly for having these specs, taking upwards of a half a minute
>to open any window or program. I tried removing start-up programs, running
>disk cleanup, doing disk defragmentations, and removing programs that i wont
>use. My sidebar gadget that gauges my ram use still sits constantly at above
>60% and the computer is slow as ever. I have called Lonovo tech support and
>they said that the problem wasnt the computer; the problem was that vista is
>a slow operating system and if i were running XP my computer would be flying.
>Am i being jerked around by Lenovo or are other people having this problem?
>Please give suggestions, any help would be appreciated.
>Thanks!

Such problems are COMMON regardless of OS or version IF something
isn't setup correctly or the OS is trying to do something or some
application is trying to do something that bogs it down.

Is the computer slow from a cold boot before you use any applications
you start as opposed to what starts automatically or only slow after
you start certain applications?

Is some of your 1 GB RAM used for graphic purposes? That can cause a
real hit in performance.

Try a fresh reboot, then immediately start up Task Manager
(CtrlAltDelete) then click on the Processes tab is see what if
anything odd is running and hogging memory. Ditto for the Services
tab.

Usual suspects include a defrag in progress, anti-virus doing a full
system scan and indexing. All can slow down some systems to a crawl.
To give such things a chance to do their thing, plug in your laptop so
you don't run down the battery, then just let it run for a few hours,
even overnight with you not doing anything with it, just walk away and
see if it improves it's response time after any housecleaning tasks
are done.

Roughly 60% memory usage is fairly NORMAL if you only have 1 GB RAM.

You can also bring up Resource Monitor from Task Manager's performance
tab. Click on the little arrow at far right and especially watch what
with CPU, Disk and Memory shows. A "normal" system running as it
should right after boot with a minimum of start up applications active
should show only spikes about 1/4 to 1/3 up on each of the before
mentioned graphs with an occasional spike taking things near the top
for a few seconds or so, then returning down to the lower range. If
any graph is showing 60% or more constant spikes or higher something
is going on that probably shouldn't be and likely in part at least is
the cause of your problem. You need to employ trial and error to try
to find out what it is.