Vista Home Basic is VERY slow on a new PC

[M Skabialka]

A friend with computer problems bought a new e-Machine form Best Buy with
Vista Home Basic pre-installed. It's a 3 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM, 160
GB HDD, etc. It is also the slowest machine I've dealt with in a long time!

All I have installed is Word 2003 and Quickbooks, set up Outlook Express,
and a new printer and a wireless connection using a PCI Adapter, both with
Vista drivers. From first turning on the machine it has been very slow.
All Windows updates were done.

What can I check to find out what is making it so slow - the 7 year old
WinXP Gateway it replaced was a speed demon by comparison.

Thanks,
Mich

 

[Keith]

I would start with increasing the RAM.

512 just isn't enough for Vista, it's the minimum. I would go to 2GBs as
optimal or 1GB if money were an issue. I'd also defrag the hard drive.

Keith

 

[M Skabialka]

He has already paid for the machine, so upgrading the RAM immediately isn't
an option, but I will try defragmenting it. Would this be a problem though
on a one day old (out of the box) machine?

 

[Keith]

That machine really needs 1GB of RAM, but I understand your friend's
concern.

My experience has been after installing an OS and applications (me or
someone else), it's always best to defrag the hard drive. Even when I
received my Dell last year, I defrag it because I didn't know if the OEM had
prior to shipping. Doubtful.

Keith

 

[Keith]

BTW... the defragging will help, but I doubt it will fix the slowness you're
talking about. RAM will help that immensly! Also, you may want to mention
the video card. Hopefully it has the minimum onboard RAM (128mb).

Keith

 

[M Skabialka]

I didn't notice the video RAM off hand, but I think it's really bad
marketing to sell a machine with the minimum specs. The purchasers are just
going to tell everyone else to avoid Gateway e-Machines and Vista because
they are too slow. A little more RAM put on by the manufacturer would not
have made that much difference to the base price. It's the same with the
printer that was bundled with it - there was no USB cable. I bought one for
$1.95. I'm sure he would have paid another couple of bucks or more to not
have me go back to a store to get that!
I'll let you know how the defrag goes after this weekend when I go back to
finish everything.
Thanks,
Mich

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

You can try defragging, but even that is often overrated.
Make sure there are not unnecessary startup programs running.
But as long as it has 512 MB, some slowness may be expected and he should
consider doubling the RAM.

I have a laptop that runs Vista Ultimate on 512 MB OK, but I still expect
better performance when I eventually upgrade RAM.

 

[ohaya]

Hi,

Just a "shot in the dark", but you might want to check if the drives
(under Device Manager->"ATA Channel 0/1"->Advanced Setting) all have DMA
enabled (plus the "DMA" checkbox checked)...

Jim

 

[BSchnur]

Well, e-Machines have tended to be a tad 'under powered' -- that's what
makes them attractive price wise.

Two obvious things --

RAM -- what speed is that lame 512M of RAM you have? These days, and
with Vista, a reasonable entry point is 1G of DDR2 533 RAM configured
as a matched pair of 512M.

Video -- if I had to guess, the video is a motherboard embedded video
(perhaps ATX X200 or a similar low end nVidia chip). This is going to
make things slow for two reasons. First, the memory for video is being
thefted from that 512M you start with -- going to 1G and faster memory
will help a lot here, second, it is an embedded video adapter and so
will not have fast processing capabilities there.

That 7 year Gateway, just how did you get XP on it in 2000????

 

[BSchnur]

I didn't notice the video RAM off hand, but I think it's really bad

marketing to sell a machine with the minimum specs.

The trick is that they can sell the system as a 'Vista system' at $399
or maybe $499. The thing is, a decently configured 'Vista system'
really should go for around $600 for starters, assuming 2G of RAM, a
decent CPU (for low end I'd go with an AMD 3800X2), and a separate
video adapter with 128M of RAM on the adapter (say an ATI X550).

 

[Guest]

I have 4 of these devices, two 0, and two 1's. Is this correct?

 

[Guest]

Mine care with 512 and I added another 1024. Is this ok? .... you mentioned
matched pair, soes adding 1024 cause problems if it isn't matched to another
1024?

thanks.

 

[BSchnur]

Mine care with 512 and I added another 1024. Is this ok? .... you mentioned

matched pair, soes adding 1024 cause problems if it isn't matched to another
1024?

Depends on the motherboard -- current motherboards support doubling up
the data path with matched pairs of modules -- note, matched pair,
taking one 512M from one manufacturer and adding a second 512M module
from a second manufacturer (even if at the same rated speed) often
results in trouble.

In any event, as you are not working with matched pairs (and were not
to begin with) going from 512M to 1.5G of memory is very much a good
thing and should show up as improved performance.