Vista Speed and Resource Use

I have been fairly satisfied with Vista, but it still has issues.

1. While I do have Outlook open and Google sidebar with Panda antivirus,
I have no other active applications. My Dual 3.2 Ghz processors are
constantly running at 10% and my 1 GB Ram is 65% used. I can hear the hard
disk constantly doing something, although not running all out as it would
during a backup.

What is using all of these resources and is it necessary?

2. When I reboot my workstation, Outlook often has a problem getting
started. Sometimes Outlook starts and sometimes it fails. It usually gets
going after about the third try. Sometimes it will startup, but some of the
tools don't work so I have to restart Outlook. Eventually it will install
ok and will work ok. I created a new Outlook profile to see if that would
make a difference. There was no difference.

It appears to me to be a problem with managing resources - particularly at
startup. Anyone else have similar problems / suggestions.

3. I noticed that there is a slight delay in accessing network drives.
It may be only 1/2 a second, but it is noticeable. Using the same
workstation and accessing the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise server using
Remote Desktop, running applications and accessing drives is instantaneous.
I am actually amazed at how responsive the remote access is. The difference
is night and day.


I would sure like to get back the workstation responsiveness that I am used
to. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

"ChuckN" <> wrote in message
news:233E8736-5F32-4F32-AF67-...
> I have been fairly satisfied with Vista, but it still has issues.
>
> 1. While I do have Outlook open and Google sidebar with Panda
> antivirus, I have no other active applications. My Dual 3.2 Ghz
> processors are constantly running at 10% and my 1 GB Ram is 65% used. I
> can hear the hard disk constantly doing something, although not running
> all out as it would during a backup.

I can only say that 1 GB is the bottom limit of RAM for Vista. I have had
better performance after going to 2 GB and for my laptop is was only a $50
investment (and that was even with not being able to reuse the 1 GB chips in
the laptop already). Check the Performance Tab in task manager and see how
much memory is being used and you will find you are near 70% to 100%
utilization at 1 GB.


--
Mark R. Cusumano
Skype Name: mark.cusumano