Vista is very very slow

Hello Al

I hope someone can help me because I don't know quite what to try

I am running Vista Ultimate 64. Here are a few details of my system,
can run siSoft Sandra and provide any more that might be needed. It's
Pentium D 3 gHz machine dual core, dual boot (XP media centre edition i
the other OS) I have 3 GB of RAM. Everything runs very smoothly unde
XP but Vista is very very sluggish, although it's inconsistent
sometimes opening a program is as fast as would be expected, often time
it's really slow (taking up to a minute). Likewise browsing the fil
system or copying files could be fast or it could be really slow
Installing programs, whether they are 32 or 64 bit is really painfull
slow

I've taken off Aero (not to increase performace, I just didn't care fo
it) and my drives are defragmented, the system is very clean, havin
been installed only a week ago

I thought the problem might be the hard disk controllers, so
uninstalled them and had windows reinstall them but this was no good. O
yes, and the chipset drivers have been installed ok

Any ideas? I've got none - I need your help

 

Suggestions:
1 more gig of RAM
Switch to 32bit OS
Check see if 64bit Vista drivers are installed for mobo

peter

 

Thanks for that suggestion (isn't 3GB quite a lot of RAM just to run a
OS before I've starting using Maya?)

Yes, thanks for taking the trouble to reply, but I found the solution
and it was very painless. I found some SATA drivers which matched th
motherboard better than the ones which were automatically installe
along with the OS and my machine has gone from being so unbelievabl
slow to very very speedy.

Sorry to waste evryone's time..

But, if anyone is suffering from slowness, real slowness, I recommen
checking if you have the best IDE/chipset/ATA drivers for you
motherboard

:

 

Since 32-bit Vista (or any other 32-bit version of Windows)
effectively can't use more than just over 3GB of RAM, those two
suggestions make no sense together.

 

So I guess he took my 3rd suggestion...............
peter

 

Hey Peter - thanks for your suggestions! I actually found the solutio
myself, minutes after I'd posted my post, a week after I began to try t
work out what on earth was up with my PC. The third suggestion was
fine suggestion (the second was not too good in my cae - I bought Vist
64 for the advantage of 64 bit audio editing. I was more than happy wit
XP. I certainly didn't get Vista for it's bizarre and fascist approac
to home computer security!
Thanks again

 

Ken I have "heard" that 32 bit Vista can use above 3.12 Gig for shared
video and can even be used as virtual memory however these functions
are not available by default. Any knowledge of these possibilities?

 

Spirit,

I'm sure that the 32 bit version is like win XP, where you have to edit the
Boot.ini file to effectively get full advantage of the additional RAM of
anything in the 4 GB range. There are TechNet articles on this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418/en-us

You can refer to them for advice on when to set switches and not.

If you own Vista, the following article explains if you have 4GB of RAM and
why the system might report less than that amount:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

Terry