CPU- OK, Mem- OK, What is vista doing?

[Simon]

Hi,

I have a fairly ok computer, Intel 3.33Ghz with 1Gb of memory, Vista
Ultimate. My 'Rating' is 2.7 and my Graphic card is my lowest score,
(everything else is 4.x and my HD is 5.2).

I hardly have anything fancy installed on my machine apart from the usual
suspects, (MS Office and the likes), I don't really play games.
I have AVG as an anti virus and I run spybot from time to time but nothing
is ever reported, (I am guessing that defender is blocking everything), S&D
Tea timer is running as well.
I have all the latest updates.

But every time I open a new application, or switch between 2 apps, it takes
for ever to do anything.
Especially Explorer, If I click on another folder it takes a long time to
load, (a couple of seconds where I cannot do anything).
Sometimes Explorer crashes simply because I selected another folder a bit to
quickly.
IE also hangs from time to time.

It is as if VISTA needs to do some thinking every time I am changing app or
doing anything related to the hard-drive

I am not been difficult here, but I think that with a machine that I should
be able to easily navigate between applications and open and close tabs.

What could be the problem?
What is VISTA doing that is causing it to hang every time I click on
something.

Simon

 

[Pepper]

Hi, Simon,
I had a similar problem. I thought 1 GB of memory was sufficient, but,
apparently Vista needs around half of that just to run. That doesn't leave
much for anything else. I recently installed 2 additional GB's, and my
computer is running much better.

Pepper

 

[RalfG]

I've got a similarly spec'ed system, same amount of RAM but with a better
video card. There are no such issues here (Vista HP). Running Tea Timer
along with Defender is somewhat redundant and is probably slowing down your
system. You may not have detectable malware but the problem is almost
certainly something in your files if it isn't defective hardware. One thing
neither of your security apps will detect, IINM, is rootkits. You can
download free scanners to specifically find those. Isolating corrupt files
OTOH may take trial and error. Note which folders Explorer is in before it
crashes and see if you can reliably reproduce the crash in the same
location(s). If so try moving some files, say 1/2 of them at a time to a new
temporary folder and see if the crash still occurs in the original folder.
Check the temporary folder as well in case there is more than one problem
file.

Internet Explorer problems are often caused by junk files saved in the
Temporary internet files folder. Try deleting the files (through IE options
menu). Sometimes it helps to also delete the browser History as well to
remove corrupted web page links.

Some free rootkit scanners:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897445.aspx

http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/sophos-anti-rootkit.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Panda_Anti-Rootkit_d5457.html

 

[John Barnes]

I had similar specs, though with 2gig ram. In my case I upgraded my 3.5Ghz
to a 5.2Ghz and it now runs very well. As noted elsewhere 2 gig or ram is a
realistic minimum. There is always a lag the first time you execute a
program as it must be read from the HD into whatever memory is available.
How fast does it load if you close it and then immediately restart it?