Laptop with Vista running slow

**Channel Hopper** · 20-09-2010

SWMBO now owns a rather nice laptop (Advent 5311) that came preloaded with Vista Home Premium Edition.

Even though the machine has a processor that is three times faster than the old one (and contains a 2GB stick of RAM under the bonnet) the pages and operation are not much faster than her original lappy running XP.

I will be playing about with the unit later today, disabling anything not needed, converting to classic look, adding Skype etc. but is there any way the Vista environment can be pruned so that it runs with a bit more ooomph ? I don't really want to go straight to Windows 7 or downgrade to XP quite yet.

(The analogue clock / adverts and other bulk on the desktop will be the first to go).

**PaulR** · 20-09-2010

Soon have it looking like W98!

**Tivù** · 20-09-2010

Not familiar with Advent, but our new Acer came with lots of OEM Crapware that included all sorts of Media Player Consoles and associated programmes which were taking up RAM ........... lots of it.

We've got 3GB RAM and 58% was in use, on average.

By stopping and removing all the bloat, I've got it down to 38%.

It seems as specs. increase, Manufacturers simply take up all the resources for no better reason than that they can.

**Analoguesat** · 20-09-2010

Anothen 1GB or 2GB of ram might help - Vista is known for being horrible bloatware with all sorts of unnecessary junk running in it..

Go to -www.crucial.com/uk and run the scanner.

And if you run whatever the vista equivalent of msconfig you can disable all sorts of rubbish from booting on startup.

On an xp machine its start - run, then type msconfig in the box. Look in the startup tab and untick anything uyou dont want to launch. Anyone trying this on their machine - DONT turn off any anti virus software!

A quick google suggests this is the Vista route:
From the Start menu, click All Programs and click Accessories.
Click Run. A Run window (command prompt) appears.
Type msconfig in the Open field and click OK.

**PaulR** · 20-09-2010

Vista (and W7) are known to be much more aggressive will allocating memoery so, even at the end of all this, it'll still seem as though it needs a lot of memory to do a little.

**Channel Hopper** · 20-09-2010

Thanks, 2GB is the largest that will fit into the machine, and it's got a single slot underneath.

Will play around this afternoon

**Mickha** · 20-09-2010

With Vista home premium you can access the msconfig utility in the same way as XP, just go to start and type msconfig in the search box.
I've disabled a few things running in the background, including Nero.

***Burnham Beech*** · 20-09-2010

I had an Acer laptop that took 5½ minutes to start up with (Acer supplied) Vista. Cleaned it out completely (reformated hard drive) and loaded Win7 and got same laptop to start up in in 1m10s.

Might have been just as good to load Vista from scratch, but never tried.

**Channel Hopper** · 20-09-2010

Originally Posted by Mickha

With Vista home premium you can access the msconfig utility in the same way as XP, just go to start and type msconfig in the search box.
I've disabled a few things running in the background, including Nero.

Thanks, but following a standard Windows upgrade online (102 updates, 13 failed) the laptop now doesn't start up.

Black screen with white writing - 'winload error, please insert Vista disc'. recovery etc. etc.

Which is something I don't have.