Quote from JTbo :

Edit: After restart when I spend few moments killing stuff Acer put there and killing stuff that Brother put there (printer) and spending little more time killing what VMWare and Ati catalyst drivers put there, it starts to run ok, then I kill sidebar and computer feels lot more responsive already. But with default install it is that shitty.

Try going into 'msconfig' and unticking the boxes for the stuff you don't want running from startup. Should cut the time to boot up, and save you having to manually kill them all each time.
I pretty much remove everything except for the Firewall/Anti-virus apps.
If you're feeling adventurous, you could also take a look at the windows processes, and see which ones you think don't actually need to be running from boot, and switch them from 'automatic' to 'manual', be a little conservative if you do that though, unless you know what the processes are actually doing.

Quote from need :

Try going into 'msconfig' and unticking the boxes for the stuff you don't want running from startup. Should cut the time to boot up, and save you having to manually kill them all each time.
I pretty much remove everything except for the Firewall/Anti-virus apps.
If you're feeling adventurous, you could also take a look at the windows processes, and see which ones you think don't actually need to be running from boot, and switch them from 'automatic' to 'manual', be a little conservative if you do that though, unless you know what the processes are actually doing.

I actually did those today and also installed updates and did some general cleaning.

It works somewhat when I browse folders and stuff like that, but when I open Word, Paint and web browser with few tabs and start working it says kabalam phuuuuu and is very slow as memory runs out

Can't get what takes all CPU power in it anyway, that is most problematic, memory issues I can solve by killing enough processes, so cause is logical, but it feels still that cpu is doing 'do nothing' loops quite a bit.

Friend has turion 1.8Ghz with 1.5GB ram, he has premium version of Vista and it is loaded, runs like a dream there, however haven't done any serious working with it, but when I open my documents it is 2 seconds at fastest, but in his computer it is split second even when freshly restarted, oh yes and all kind of gadgets running, cpu load does not hit even 50% when opening folder, for me it is 100% for 2 seconds at minimum what I have managed to squeeze from this.

Maybe I do fresh install for that, is real PITA because of programs I need for it, but have to do something.

Oh yes, tested that Vista machine of mine with DSL (Damn Small Linux) goddammit how fast it was, that thing flied

Quote from AndroidXP :

You got Vista? My condolences.

Lmfao! That made my day

Prize for the most pointless sidebar gadget has to go to the crunchy apple app.

Quote from al heeley :

Prize for the most pointless sidebar gadget has to go to the crunchy apple app.

There is also that my pictures slideshow sidebar app, I find it rather pointless also

Quote from al heeley :

I'd love to know how to input some UK weather stations closer to my area.

There's a list of stations supported by the gadget here:
http://weather.cobbnz.com/weather/ViewWeatherSites.aspx

And here you can see a world wide map:
http://weather.cobbnz.com/weather/MesoMap.aspx

Not all have been added to the gadgets list, but if there's a station close to you that isn't, you can either add it yourself or get the station owner to do it.

Quote from anik360 :

thats how much ram i use and i have 2 gb but does use quite a lot of cpu mostly 10-23% for sidebar alone

It really stays at 40% when idle? Somethings wrong then...

I work as a computer technician, and when people come with their computers complaining about it being slow and crashing a lot, it's almost always one of these things:

* Infected with viruses or malware
* Bad sectors on the harddrive
* They have way too many programs running in the background
* They have Norton installed

sorry for being thick, but thats what I want to do- add the weather area for manchester airport, but i can't see how to do it.
It's the Clientraw.txt thing

JTBO- I read awhile back that Vista can use your flash drive as a portable pagefile. When you take your flash drive out, is it possible that the pagefile is reverting back to being accessed by the HD, which ends up looking like you have more accessible memory?

Just a thought... I haven't used Vista at all, my only experience with it is clicking icons in computer stores

I used that stupid flash-drive thing, It's so un-noticable, might as well not even be there, but when flash drives were 12$(6£) each, I had to grab one, just to mess around with/install linux on it.

http://www.activewin.com/revie ... ry/vista/readyboost.shtml
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=6

Shows how negliable of a gain Readyboost is.

Those two updates might actually do something, I did kill about everything what I could without causing problems for normal usage and can't say if it is those patches or my killfrenzy, but that vista machine boots now in 5minutes instead of 10, however I don't have any Acer stuff anymore and I remember that giving bit of problem when need to join new network or so.

But still can't use sidebar as it increases CPU usage by 20%, maybe there is going to be fix for that in future, at least hopefully.
However now I have 650MB in cache so thing actually starts working a bit fluently, still chokes at times, but not so bad as before.

OS is now taking approx 300MB then + what is swapped, compare this to what factory default was, 700MB and it is bit of improvement...

BTW, killed Ati Catalyst Control center too, whopping 100MB just because user might go to driver settings some day and better load it fast by keeping whole bloatware in memory.

Also I did disable lot of windows services, still thinking if search indexer should be killed too, however I let that be for a while, but killed windows mediaplayer sharing etc. stuff, there was loads of that kind of crap.

Also I did use program that was linked in this thread and did choose option that says something about forcing unload of .dll files and it seems to be that now closing apps actually does do something positive :P

I would think that most important thing with Vista is to keep your Cache above 500MB mark, else performance suffers greatly.

Edit: oh yes, got rid of readyboost also, pretty much every helper / easy to use function

Edit2: worked well a moment, but has been doing something odd for several minutes now, CPU usage 40-100% and HDD cries for mercy, bit slow to use again, pffff. I guess some other automatic function begs to get killed.

Edit3: Killed that search indexer, magically it did free ~60MB of ram and cpu load is staying 0-2% range when computer is idling, before hardly ever it did stay under 10%. Sure searching takes more time, but I usually know where to look and if I need searching I just put it searching on background and do something else meanwhile. Very recommendable, from services disable windows search...

Edit4: Tested LFS in laptop and it was 10-20fps more, less improvement at fast places, but more at slow places, I guess that is it from Vista's stopping processes that are not needed to give game cpu power it needs... 30->50fps is big jump, imo.

Edit5: Another log entry, sidebar uses now only 4-5% of cpu constantly and only 15MB or so memory, this after I disabled search, something dodgy in that search, imo.

I tryed readyboost out, but it's useless.

Quote from al heeley :

sorry for being thick, but thats what I want to do- add the weather area for manchester airport, but i can't see how to do it.
It's the Clientraw.txt thing

Open the gadgets config screen and type Manchester in the location field?

personally i think vista is sux big time for a lot of reason im waiting for xp sp3,it has a beta but not for "us" so hopefully comes soon for "us"

@JTbo: 10, 5 minutes to boot? Wow, that's quite a lot!
On my system (AMD X2 4600, 2GB, SATA disk), Vista takes 31 seconds from start of boot till desktop appears. XP takes 23 seconds.

To me it sounds like you may have a faulty harddrive. Download a program called HDD Regenerator and let it scan your drive. I have used it with great success on quite a few harddrives that were almost impossible to read from. It really can do wonders to a bad HD.

Quote from arco :

Open the gadgets config screen and type Manchester in the location field?

yeah, I managed to think of that on my own, - it says 'sorry' (that's nice), 'no weather sites match your criteria' even though they have a site on their moving map thing for Manchester. Oh well.

That's cuz you're in the UK, you shouldn't need weather, you should wake up and go "Cloudy with showers"..

Quote from arco :

@JTbo: 10, 5 minutes to boot? Wow, that's quite a lot!
On my system (AMD X2 4600, 2GB, SATA disk), Vista takes 31 seconds from start of boot till desktop appears. XP takes 23 seconds.

To me it sounds like you may have a faulty harddrive. Download a program called HDD Regenerator and let it scan your drive. I have used it with great success on quite a few harddrives that were almost impossible to read from. It really can do wonders to a bad HD.

Laptop with 5400rpm drive, I doubt that there is much more to except, can try program, who knows, maybe there is something, but we have 15 of these and all are same

in vista's task manager in the processes tab I can't seem to find the 'virtual memory' radio button in the views section. In XP I could see how much each app was using, But in vista it's not there...is 'paged pool' the vista equivalent?

e:

also, dwm.exe(Desktop Windows Managment) uses about 50mb of mem...is it needed?

Quote from CSU1 :

in vista's task manager in the processes tab I can't seem to find the 'virtual memory' radio button in the views section. In XP I could see how much each app was using, But in vista it's not there...is 'paged pool' the vista equivalent?

e:

also, dwm.exe(Desktop Windows Managment) uses about 50mb of mem...is it needed?

I don't even have dwm.exe at all, I guess that is something to do with aero crap

cheers...so I've just taken a load of 48mb off my system....and the only difference is the window edges aren't transparent anymore hardly worth keeping aero on imo

E;

this lack of info on virtual mem size of processes is pissing me off....I cant see what apps are using cache?

Quote from CSU1 :

cheers...so I've just taken a load of 48mb off my system....and the only difference is the window edges aren't transparent anymore hardly worth keeping aero on imo

E;

this lack of info on virtual mem size of processes is pissing me off....I cant see what apps are using cache?

In vista everything is put into swap file with some weirdo logic, lot of mem is then given to file cache, to make it faster to load from swap file I guess

Traditionally 0 swap has been optimal situation, with vista not like that, aim to have lot of file cache as stuff is put into that swap file no matter what.

At times vista gets silly idea to stuff more stuff into swap file, now if you are playing LFS with fps locked to 60fps, cpu load is not all that high, vista gets idea to stuff more stuff from ram to swap file while you are finally seen opening left by guy front of you, you go for it and suddenly HUGE fps drop you see pic from here and there, finally finding that you took 3 guys out and kickban is in progress, might be that you manage just see your car in wall when kickbanned.
Sometimes vista starts defrag or searchindexer in similar situation.

It is nice idea to use idle time for mainentance tasks, but certainly little better handling of that would be needed, some switch to turn all those off if app X is running or something.

If you haven't guessed, I do hate automated tasks without limited schedule

edit: to find out how much memory vista totally needs at given moment I use this:
Total physical ram + swap file usage - ram free - cache.

swap 584MB + total ram 957MB - ram free 12MB - cache 680MB = 849MB
Memory usage bar says 375MB at the moment, I have firefox with only this page and calculator running...

Before I heavily crippled most of stuff that Acer and Microsoft preferred to be running it took 2021MB of memory to do surfing in 3 tabs without calculator running

Sorry for this slightly off-topic bump, but after my motherboard died i'm on a spare PC (My Dad never sells old stuff, so as a result we have a PC with a single core AMD 4000, 2 GB of RAM and a 7800GTX "kicking about") and i must say Vista really sucks on single cores - it seems that Vista likes to randomly spike CPU usage which you don't usually notice on a dual core.