Vista slow? Says who?
I’ve read a bunch of complaints from people about how slow Windows Vista is. Frankly, I’m mystified by those complaints, because my experience is the exact opposite. Apparently I’m not alone. Carl Campos has documented his 10 weeks with Windows Vista:
After 10 years of supporting Windows systems, I have a good feel for how fast a system works, sort of like a mechanic who can listen to a car idle and identify its problems. Vista is quick, responsive and it seems to multitask better than XP. Vista, unlike XP, is still usable when applications hog the 100% of the CPU or constantly page the hard drive. Vista uses a tremendous amount of memory while not doing much, but it doesn’t appear to affect the feel of the system at all.
Overall, it’s an excellent piece of writing, with a well-rounded, balanced look at the pros and cons of Vista. Well worth reading.
That sounds like a driver refusing to unload.
As for changing a setting in MSConfig and rebooting, I just did that on a default install here. Windows Defender does not appear. I’ve run Windows Vista on dozens of machines and never seen that behavior. In fact, it makes no sense. Update: Whoops, I take that back. I see what you’re describing now, after a different set of changes.
The funny (not humorous) thing about the problem you’re describi ng is that it probably has one cause. Fix that cause and all the problems magically go away. If I were you, I would try a complete, clean reinstall.
Richard, do you have any other security software running besides the built-in stuff?
Ed, I’m playing “normal user” with an Acer notebook. After a nearly four-week hiatus due to hardware failure and Acer incompetence, I have the notebook back and am testing again.
Per your question on #22, I think that third-party software can be blamed for many performance issues. I get lots of strange messages from the Symantec stuff that was installed on this system by Acer.
However, there are a few out-of-box things that Vista does that may be giving users a bad experience. The indexing service took quite a while to do its thing on this system, and during that time the drive light was on constantly. I know it uses low-priority I/O but it still made things slow at times when I went to use the system.
I never had XP installed on this system so I can’t do an A-B comparison, but Vista seems to be about the speed I’d expect if I did have XP installed.
@Ed
You asked if I was running any security software. I am using Grisoft’s free AVG anti-virus software and nothing else except Microsoft Vista security.
Richard
Ed,
Thanks very much for the link. My traffic went from next to nothing to a REALLY BIG SPIKE overnight, so I appreciate the attention. Thanks to everyone who visited and commented.
I’ve seen the same issue as Jeremy Wright, where UAC prompts appear just to delete a shortcut. My experience has been that this is due to apps that aren’t really compatible with Vista and must be installed under the local Admin account. If you’re running as a normal user and you install the app as an Admin, it’s the Admin’s shortcut. Your normal user doesn’t have permission to do anything with the shortcut, so you get a UAC prompt to delete it. I also want to say I’ve actually seen more than one UAC prompt to delete a single shortcut, but I don’t remember for sure.
To Jeremy Wright: Turn off UAC, or user account control if you are administrator to tell vista to STOP MAKING YOU CONFIRM 3 TIMES TO DELETE SOMETHING! I hated it too till i turned off UAC cuz i saw “User account control help protect attackers from your computer” or whatever so i searched the computer for “user account control” and turned it right off! Annoyance solved for a friends computer. I won’t switch to vista for a LOOOOONG Time. ill wait til the next MS OS is about to come out to get vista. I got XP just 2 years ago. I had to put up with WinME for 4 years. I’d like to move to Ubuntu all the way.
I removed Vista from my home machine after several months of continuous problems. I got tired of the wacky DRM behavior. Some DVDs would play, others wouldn’t. Driver support was sketchy at best. But the main reason I upgraded from Vista back to XP was speed. I have a AMD X2 4400 chip with Nvidia 6600GT GPU and 2 GB RAM and Vista ran like a dog. The same goes for my Dell laptop. On both machines XP feels significantly faster. I like a lot of features of Vista included SEARCH that works really well. But it doesn’t feel ready for prime time. Until the get the driver situation worked out as well as performance issues, I’ll have to stick with XP Pro.
I have an Acer Laptop that came pre installed with Vista Business. It was fine to start with, but has recently developed a login/startup issue. After I have logged in, the desktop displays, populated and then the machine “thinks” for about 45 seconds, I can do nothing during this time.
After it has finished whatever its doing, then the machine is back to it’s usual speeding self?! I tried to get task manger going so I could see what processes where running, but nothing responds during the time.
I also had an issue using file sync (offline files) and changing the name of files on network shares. Turns out it’s an OEM install issue and you have to edit the registry. I wonder how many other features are broken or glitches are caused by the OEM install?
I don’t get the luxury of a clean install as the vendor doesn’t supply any disks. So it’s their install or nothing.
My son just got brand new PC with vista home and amd dual core.
The OS loads fast but GAMES suck at loading, incredably long time to load any new game!!!
A lot of hos friends have reverted back tp XP for gamming.
I just got a brand new Dell laptop (Core Duo, 2Gb RAM) and I find that Vista is painful on several fronts.
Firstly, it takes about 3 minutes to load up. By load up, I mean the time it takes from pressing the ‘on’ button to the time when I can get the Google search page to appear in a browser.
Ubuntu on my 4 year old desktop takes 45 seconds for same test.
I find it really annoying that the login screen comes up quickly that the machine is still unavailable for several minutes *after* logging in.
Secondly, the confirmation dialogs drive me *nuts*. I’m a power user. When I try to do something I want the PC to do it, not ask me if I really want to do it.
I’m seriously considering sending this machine back to Dell and requesting that they install Win2K on it. I’d settle for XP, but Win2K is the pinnacle of Microsoft’s OS family.
I have found Vista overall to be slower to Ubuntu which is my primary os, and its slower or faster in different areas to XP. Games in Vista are very bad (could be a driver issue) I have Command and conquer 3 on low settings in vistsa……. and full settings in XP, Cs Source wont run in vista without freezing randomly every few seconds. DVD playback has been a nightmare and the computer slows down a lot when I put a dvd movie in(DRM?). Sometimes a program will take a long time to load others its faster than XP.
I was impressed that it found my wireless and it was working as soon as install had finished. The interface is very nice looking (nicer in some areas than my beryl themes on Linux).
Over all I would not recomend Vista yet, some people say its better some say its slower and for me its a bit of both. In my opinion its still a Beta, but an expensive one.
I’m VERY frustrated with Vista. I saved up for a long time to buy a new laptop, and now I’m completely disappointed with my purchase that runs Vista instead of XP. My laptop is an HP, Core 2 Duo with 1 gig RAM, but it runs MUCH slower than my 4 year old desktop that runs XP. Boot up under XP took about 20 seconds, but my new laptop takes over one minute to boot, and the shut down is very slow too.
My laptop is only used for basic things such as email and MS Word, but even these simple tasks take a lot longer than my old computer. Even opening a text file can take several seconds in my Vista (my old XP system would open the same file instantly.)
I had thought that my new laptop would be very fast since I’m using one of the latest processors, but I’m really disappointed. I’ve tried to eliminate most of the junk that HP had loading on boot, but removing these things hasn’t helped the slowness problem.
I read that some people have had a very good experience with Vista. I’m not looking for a super-fast system, I’d just like my laptop to run about as fast as my old 2.6 GHz machine running XP.
What should I look for to improve my system’s speed?
Does anyone know if any OEM windows install cd will work or does it have to be specific? I have the cd key printed on my laptop but the (official) windows XP install cd is corroupt. Can I just grab any ISO and have the cd key work? Has anyone had much luck getting HP to just send a replacement?
Looks like im stuck in vista for now for any games .
For anyone here looking for a fast OS (For anything but games really) id try Linux, I use Ubuntu which is lightning fast on my laptop.
For Vista there is allways Vlite http://www.vlite.net/ You can use it to remove/add stuff from the vista install (not sure if its a good idea TBH) Maybe you can trim it down for speed? I did it with XP on another computer and got a lot better performance, but I dont know enough about vista to try it.
with each windows os come more features and better desgined software features to make things more powerful like ms word. but that doesn’t mean faster. my advice for bert is if you are doing basic stuff stick to the basic stuff that you had before on newer hardware it will run fast with no problems. Im assuming that when vista and microsoft software was developed that they considered the hardaware and acceptable idle time or wait for completeing tasks….. maybe your wait time for a program vs the capabilty of it is different since you only want to do the basic. there are plenty of people computer science proffesors and reasearchers that still use windows 98 or windows 2000 because the basics are all they need
Sadly my own experience has been nightmarish with Vista. Starting up takes several minutes. ctrl alt deleting to shut down a frequently locked up program such as firefox or the like can take up to a minute before the task manager is accessible.
It’s bad enough that I’m seriously considering a Mac – and I work for MS.
Hey homeboy:
Thanks for thinking about my problem(s) and giving me your advice:
“my advice for bert is if you are doing basic stuff stick to the basic stuff that you had before on newer hardware it will run fast with no problems.”
Unfortunately, I’ve spent over $1000 on my new laptop, and now I’m stuck with Vista. If there was a way to make HP load XP onto my laptop I would do it, but HP says since the laptop came with Vista, I’m stuck with it.
I don’t know that much about laptop computers, but can I simply purchase a retail version of XP and install it on my new laptop? HP told me they customize the OS to work with a given computer, so how do I get a retail version to work properly?
Bert, if you’re unhappy with the performance of your nerw computer, take it back and get a refund or get a different model from a different manufacturer. You paid for it, you have a right to be happy with it.
I really, really wanted to like Windows Vista. I put Vista Ultimate on my HP DV9000T laptop, and have been regretting it ever since. I have 1.5GB RAM, 1.73Ghz Core Duo, and NVidia GeForce Go 7600 + 512MB. That’s pretty good, IMO. WEI says I get a 4.5 overall.
But does it run fast? No. My disk constantly grinds, especially when coming out of sleep. Sometimes it doesn’t come out of sleep. And, my fan runs nonstop. My laptop sounds like a Harrier jet. My wrist rests are uncomfortably hot, and my battery life actually did take a 25% hit despite assurances from many people that this would not be the case.
I traced a lot of the problems to Aero and desktop composition. After turning off desktop composition, my fan has become a lot more reasonable, but still runs more than it did under XP. Overall, things are snappier and more usable without desktop composition. I don’t miss it, actually – Flip3D was a useless toy, and thumbnails really don’t affect my productivity significantly.
Overall, thumbs down, way down, for Vista performance. I own MSFT stock, BTW, so I’m not very predisposed to hating this OS. But I do.
Kevin, that is not normal behavior. I have several notebooks here with similar specs that do not exhibit this behavior. Have you looked in Reliability and Performance Monitor to see what is causing the CPU and disk activity? Dwm.exe should not be the offender. All it is doing is following orders from an out-of-control program.
Ed, you’re right – I would hope this isn’t normal. I have not used the Reliability and Performance Monitor, yet, but at your suggestion, I’ll give it a try. I have looked in Task Manager repeatedly to see if anything is chewing CPU, and it looked like nothing was out of control. The only thing I know is that my out-of-box experience has been very bad.
Anyways, always enjoy your articles, thanks for the response!
PS. Can someone explain why Chess Titans eats up 100MB of RAM, and Solitaire chews up 50MB?