Increasing Vista speed?

[Paul T]

I asked in an earlier post how I can increase the speed of Vista, I
definietly found a little loss in speed going from XP Pro to Vista Premium,
not enough to ever think of going back to XP. I am running a P4 3 with 1gb
memory, I thought maybe not enough ram was the problem hearing that Vista
likes 2Gb of ram so I put the ram/cpu meter gadget on my sidebar to see how
much memory was being used in different programs and never has the ram meter
gotten above 75% and that was running programs from Work to Unreal
Tournament 2004, the 75% was usually just a spike reading and always dropped
back down to around 50% pretty quick. For most programs it's stays between
44% to 49%.. To me this says I have plenty of ram, is my conclusion correct?

 

[kirk jim]

How much ram do you have installed now?

 

[Paul T]

1gb memory

How much ram do you have installed now?

 

[PTravel]

I asked in an earlier post how I can increase the speed of Vista, I
definietly found a little loss in speed going from XP Pro to Vista Premium,
not enough to ever think of going back to XP. I am running a P4 3 with 1gb
memory, I thought maybe not enough ram was the problem hearing that Vista
likes 2Gb of ram so I put the ram/cpu meter gadget on my sidebar to see how
much memory was being used in different programs and never has the ram
meter gotten above 75% and that was running programs from Work to Unreal
Tournament 2004, the 75% was usually just a spike reading and always
dropped back down to around 50% pretty quick. For most programs it's stays
between 44% to 49%.. To me this says I have plenty of ram, is my conclusion
correct?

I wouldn't go just by utilization. I bumped up my laptop from 1 gig to 2
gigs and it made a pretty noticeable difference in speed and smoothness.
However, my RAM utilization rarely goes over 40%.

 

[S.Daley]

Try disabling/tweaking some unneccesary services..

SD

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfgA-D.htm

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

The main indicator for speed is how does it feel to you. If you are
satisfied with the performance, and do not see any detrimental effects, then
you have enough RAM.

There are so many systems out there with 4GB of RAM installed that will
never even use half that amount.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Check out this article from Extreme Tech:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2110595,00.asp

 

[Paul T]

Great article Andre, I did make some changes as suggested, hopefully it will
help a bit, I know you can't use the Ram meter as a true tool but if it's
not pushing up into using 80-90% for any programs I would think all is fine,
although I really haven't gotten into any graphic intense work yet but I
would think the 256mb vid card would take the load off the ram.. Correct?

 

[kirk jim]

I will explain here because some VistaBoys have no clue about vista,
claiming that vista works fine with 512 mb ram!

As you add more ram vista expands to utilize more of it.
For example with 512 mb, you will still see that it leaves some memory free
(although vista is starving with 512 mb and pages some information). This is
a deception.. it may SEEM free, but its constraining itself.

If then you install 1 gb of ram you see that Vista (alone) using more than
512 mb just while its sitting there. How could this be? Well it sees more
ram and
starts loading stuff into the ram so functions and programs will be faster.
This is all buffering technology with new names,
so that ancient technology can become selling points (superfetch)

However I have seen that after 1.5 gb this expansion stops even if you have
4 gigs (which it sees 3 anyway). The rest is available for the memory
intense applications, for example like loading huge images on photoshop.

 

[kirk jim]

The main indicator for speed is how does it feel to you.

MVP Sir... you are saying BOGUS! Im not surprised... Im getting used to
seeing that from MVP's.

Speed is not about different perception. Speed is a measurable thing,
that you can done with precision if you know how, and NO, im not talking
about stupid benchmarks! Benchmarks dont show all the aspects, thus the true
nature of an OS.
Thats why they show vista only slightly slower than XP, while in reality,
it is far slower. (some benchmarks show how gross vista is when doing 3d
graphics though.. in some cases
its 70% SLOWER than XP!). What can I say... vista is poorly designed,
especially the GUI. The gui was made
by monkeys! The fact that some people accepted it, or even like it, is
scary! These people have no understanding
about human - computer interaction. XP's gui was far far better. Almost
EVERY change they did in Vista was
a bad one! I thought new versions should be better, not worse!

After about 1.5 gigs vista stops expanding itself, and leaves the rest of
the ram vacant for application use. So there are precise LAWS that you can
see
in the function of Vista... it has nothing to do with perception.

That's why people (mostly vistaboys) that claim that vista works "fine or
great" with 512 mb, need
to stop eating grinded up plastic vista dvds.. all that plastic is making
them dumber!

512mb is not enough.. vista starves with so little memory.....

 

[Robert Moir]

I asked in an earlier post how I can increase the speed of Vista, I
definietly found a little loss in speed going from XP Pro to Vista Premium,
not enough to ever think of going back to XP. I am running a P4 3 with 1gb
memory, I thought maybe not enough ram was the problem hearing that Vista
likes 2Gb of ram so I put the ram/cpu meter gadget on my sidebar to see how
much memory was being used in different programs and never has the ram
meter gotten above 75% and that was running programs from Work to Unreal
Tournament 2004, the 75% was usually just a spike reading and always
dropped back down to around 50% pretty quick. For most programs it's stays
between 44% to 49%.. To me this says I have plenty of ram, is my conclusion
correct?

It's understandable why you might think that, but I'd say that your 1Gb is
the minimum possible for comfortable work in Vista. This might be ample for
someone making light and casual use of their system. I would say that if
you're happy with your system as it is then you shouldn't worry too much
about numbers.

However, in my experience, Vista will certainly show a noticable improvement
if you stick just 512Mb of ram in there on top of what you have now. Given
the price of memory these days, if you're opening the case to do that much,
you might as well add a full gigabyte to bring things up to 2Gb. Essentially
Vista likes to have space to work with in memory. The more memory you give
it, the more it can do to make use of it and the less often it has to refer
to virtual memory (pagefile on disk) and the smoother things will run.

You mention playing a game above, gaming is actually a quite intense
activity on a computer and certainly the newer games out there will welcome
the extra memory.

 

[Joe Guidera]

Just be careful. Depending on your circumstances some of the services in
this article the author suggests disabling you actually need (for example if
you're on a home network and want to share resources between two computers).

J

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

The GPU should off load Vista's graphical effects to the Desktop Windows
Manager which should provide a smoother experience especially for a 256 MB
video card.

 

[Mikey]

Vista is slower for me aswell

its like XP was running like a Super Car and Vista is a small family saloon
car