Every App and Vista itself runs at only half the speed

[Guest]

Hello.

Since I installed Vista every application and the OS itself runs approx. at
half the speed it used to. It seems to be a problem of the hardware I use,
because I've seen all those apps und Vista itself running perfectly at two or
three times the speed on comparable hardware running Vista or XP.
Additionally every app worked perfectly on my computer when I was still using
Win2000.

For example: A complete rebuild of a project in Visual Studio 2005 needed 3
minutes before. After switching to Vista this rebuild needs more than 10
minutes.

Another example: Every game is running only at half the frames per second it
ran before.

Aditionally every app in fullscreen mode (games) have heavy slow downs after
a few minutes. Under Win2k or XP some game had 60fps, under Vista it has
30fps or less and after a few minutes the framerate drops to sometimes 2 fps,
sometimes 15 fps and sometime to 0.5fps! It usually recovers back to 30 fps
after 20 seconds or sometime not before 3 minutes.

I profiled my own code to find out what might be the reason. I compared the
results to a profiling session of the same app done under WinXP. The
comparison indicates that every call to any DirectX-function (DirectX 9.0c)
takes at least twice the time as normal, sometimes more. Also every memory
memory allocation/deallocation seems to consume more time than usual.

Hardware: Motherboard ASROCK K7Upgrade-880, AthlonXP 3200+ at 2.2GHz,
Gainward Geforce 7800, 2GB RAM, some Soundblaster Audigy Card, Windows Vista
Business 32Bit.

- every driver ist up to date.
- removing graphics card or sound card didn't solve the problem
- updating BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off every unneeded feature in BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off AERO completely didn't solve the problem
- all temperatures and fan speeds are ok
- RAM check didn't find any problem
- event log doesn't show any problems or hardware conflicts

Still every software and Vista itself runs slow. I'm out of ideas by now
where I could even begin to search for the reason.

Any ideas are greatly welcome.

Thanks and Bye,

Stefan

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Well, the resources of the operating system in addition to your choice of
applications can greatly affect the computers performance. Vista is known to
love RAM, the more you give it, the better it performs. Other factors
include the processor speed and the on going improvements to performance.

 

[John E]

Hello.

Since I installed Vista every application and the OS itself runs approx.
at
half the speed it used to. It seems to be a problem of the hardware I use,
because I've seen all those apps und Vista itself running perfectly at two
or
three times the speed on comparable hardware running Vista or XP.
Additionally every app worked perfectly on my computer when I was still
using
Win2000.

For example: A complete rebuild of a project in Visual Studio 2005 needed
3
minutes before. After switching to Vista this rebuild needs more than 10
minutes.

Another example: Every game is running only at half the frames per second
it
ran before.

Aditionally every app in fullscreen mode (games) have heavy slow downs
after
a few minutes. Under Win2k or XP some game had 60fps, under Vista it has
30fps or less and after a few minutes the framerate drops to sometimes 2
fps,
sometimes 15 fps and sometime to 0.5fps! It usually recovers back to 30
fps
after 20 seconds or sometime not before 3 minutes.

I profiled my own code to find out what might be the reason. I compared
the
results to a profiling session of the same app done under WinXP. The
comparison indicates that every call to any DirectX-function (DirectX
9.0c)
takes at least twice the time as normal, sometimes more. Also every memory
memory allocation/deallocation seems to consume more time than usual.

Hardware: Motherboard ASROCK K7Upgrade-880, AthlonXP 3200+ at 2.2GHz,
Gainward Geforce 7800, 2GB RAM, some Soundblaster Audigy Card, Windows
Vista
Business 32Bit.

- every driver ist up to date.
- removing graphics card or sound card didn't solve the problem
- updating BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off every unneeded feature in BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off AERO completely didn't solve the problem
- all temperatures and fan speeds are ok
- RAM check didn't find any problem
- event log doesn't show any problems or hardware conflicts

Still every software and Vista itself runs slow. I'm out of ideas by now
where I could even begin to search for the reason.

Any ideas are greatly welcome.

Thanks and Bye,

Stefan

Is the power plan setting set to "High performance"?

Right click computer, select properties, then performance, then adjust power
settings.

If you are on 'power saver', it throttles the cpu to half speed. So check
high performance, and you should get maximum speed. If you click on 'change
plan settings' you can adjust some of the other settings to save power.

John

 

[Guest]

Is the power plan setting set to "High performance"?

Yes. Set to High Performance.

Well, the resources of the operating system in addition to your choice of
applications can greatly affect the computers performance.

All applications ran at full speed on the very same hardware when I was
still using Win2000. And the very same applications run at full speed on
performance-wise comparable hardware under Vista. Just on my hardware and
only under Vista everything runs at half or a third of the speed.

This leads me to belief that some hardware is the reason.

Could a System Diagnostics Report shed some light on this issue? If yes, to
whom can I send one?

Thanks for your advice.

Stefan

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

Windows 2000 uses less resources in comparison to Vista, Vista is newer, so
it requires a little bit more in terms of performance, so you might see a
dip in performance on certain things. Try running XP on machine from 1998,
obviously things are gonna run a bit slower.

 

[Michael Walraven]

A second place to check is in the BIOS. There may be a setting referring to
'speed step' or some such.
As I understand it if speed step is not enabled then Vista / BIOS defaults
to slowest speed available.

Also as a check on how things are working open Reliability and Performance
monitor.
In the Resource overview the CPU graph should have two lines. One for CPU
usage and the second for Maximum Frequency.
On my system for instance the Maximum Frequency sits at 66% when the system
is not busy and rushes up to 100% when doing actual heavy work.

Michael
Vista Home Premium

 

[NoStop]

Well, the resources of the operating system in addition to your choice of
applications can greatly affect the computers performance. Vista is known
to love RAM, the more you give it, the better it performs. Other factors
include the processor speed and the on going improvements to performance.

You didn't address the OP's concerns at all, other than to admit that Vista
is a kludge and far too resource demanding. With this, most would agree.

The hardware the OP is running is plenty for any reasonably written
operating system. I guess Vista doesn't fall within that camp.

Cheers.

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

The OP is expecting his machine to fly, obviously there are certain resource
constraints associated with running a much newer version of Windows. Imagine
running XP on a 1997 era machine, it would obviously be slower in comparison
to NT 4.

 

[Charlie Tame]

Yes. Set to High Performance.



All applications ran at full speed on the very same hardware when I was
still using Win2000. And the very same applications run at full speed on
performance-wise comparable hardware under Vista. Just on my hardware and
only under Vista everything runs at half or a third of the speed.

This leads me to belief that some hardware is the reason.

Could a System Diagnostics Report shed some light on this issue? If yes, to
whom can I send one?

Thanks for your advice.

Stefan

Is it an NVidia MB? I note they just released new drivers for their
chipset for XP and wonder if this also applies to Vista?

One of mine was real slow without the MB CD drivers (And of course they
have been updated online since) but even without the orginal CD versions
it was pretty dead

 

[Guest]

The OP is expecting his machine to fly, obviously there are certain resource
constraints associated with running a much newer version of Windows. Imagine
running XP on a 1997 era machine, it would obviously be slower in comparison
to NT 4.

Am I really that unclear about my problem? If yes, then I would like to know
what I'm explaining wrong. This is not personal or something, that also
applies to all the other answers.

I'll try to rephrase:

My Hardware - WinXP: Speed is normal. Every Software, the OS itself, too
My Hardware - Win2K: Speed is normal. Every Software, the OS itself, too
My Hardware - Vista: Speed is ONE THIRD. Every Software, the OS itself, too.
Comparable Hardware - Vista: Speed Normal. Every Software, the OS itself, too
Comparable Hardware - WinXP: Speed Normal. Every Software, the OS itself, too
Comparable Hardware - Win2K: Speed Normal. Every Software, the OS itself, too

And yes, I know, when Hardware is comparable. I'm quite experienced with
computers. This does not mean that I dont apprieciate your responses. It just
means that is not really about the problem I wanted to describe.

I know, how to setup the BIOS and which BIOS option means what. I know,
where to look for systen logs, system settings and so on.

Furthermore on another post:

Windows 2000 uses less resources in comparison to Vista,

I completely agree. But not three times as much!

Vista is newer, so
it requires a little bit more in terms of performance, so you might see a
dip in performance on certain things.

Not a dip in performance. Not on certain things. Three times slower! Every
application! The OS itself, every game, Visual Studio 2005, all software
included with Vista, everything!

Does that make my problem a bit clearer? I just have no idea where I could
get a clue where I can analyse more detailed what is wrong with my hardware.

Thanks alot though,

Stefan.

 

[Guest]

A second place to check is in the BIOS. There may be a setting referring to
'speed step' or some such.
As I understand it if speed step is not enabled then Vista / BIOS defaults
to slowest speed available.

My Motherboard (or the CPU) does not support Speed Step or something
similar. I've checked the frequency at several places. It runs at full speed
all the time. Athlon 3200+ @2.2GHz always running at 2.2GHz.

Also as a check on how things are working open Reliability and Performance
monitor.
In the Resource overview the CPU graph should have two lines. One for CPU
usage and the second for Maximum Frequency.

Everything is fine there. CPU is running at full speed.


Thanks for your hints!

Stefan.

 

[Michael Walraven]

Stefan,

Grasping at straws here,

At times my Vista was dog slow, problem at that time was AVG anti virus. I
normally let my machine go to sleep.
When I would wake it, the AVG would start a new scan. The AVG did not
relinquish the machine when I was using it and performed the scan in the
foreground as normal priority. The result was that CPU usage was low, disk
usage was high and response was terrible

If I stopped the AVG then my response came back.
This would show up in Reliability and Performance monitor as 100% usage.

Just because the disk is busy does not slow my machine down, it seems to
depend on how well the software is written.
For instance right now disk activity is 100%, disk light on nearly
continually, 'System' is playing with the System Volume information and
response is just fine. While I was typing the disk activity ceased, no
effect on response (remained fine).

So: Perhaps some background utility that is not playing nice and hogging
the CPU, I would suspect a third party one rather than MS but I have heard
it rumored that sometime MS has made mistakes also

Michael
Vista Home Premium

 

[Charlie Tame]

My Motherboard (or the CPU) does not support Speed Step or something
similar. I've checked the frequency at several places. It runs at full speed
all the time. Athlon 3200+ @2.2GHz always running at 2.2GHz.


Everything is fine there. CPU is running at full speed.


Thanks for your hints!

Stefan.

You first post was clear as crystal Stefan, problem is I lack any
positive answers. You sound very positive about the 1/3 and the clock
stepping thing makes sense but if not that then I can only think of
something like Memory and or the timing thereof.

That would sound like a BIOS setting but you checked all that so I am
stuck with some chipset driver that's making a drastic bottleneck
somewhere. Have you checked the MB maker's website forums just in case
there's a hint there?

I am not sure about SLI technology, wondering if there could be a card
or something in a slot that is giving a conflict under Vista that's not
there under XP etc... You picked a good one for sure Sorry the best I
can manage is guesswork

 

[Jume]

not sure about what would the reason (well being far away from the machine
is like this...)

to have a comparison, im running on an athlon xp 1700+ @ 1,4ghz, 896mb ram @
133mhz, nvidia 7600gt agp 4x
and yes, vista is slower than xp here, but not that much, i would say about
a 5-10%, mainly due to slower memory i guess (still usable enough, and since
i liked vista since rcs i dont care about that performance drop at all)

here we go:
-try deactivating any background software you can, either from startup and
from within your user (antivirus included, if not most important of all)
-try stripping as much hardware devices as you can, mainly usbs (moreover if
your chipset is via like mine, they are pretty useless when accessing
hardware, my old p2 with its intel chipset were faster than this one)
-create a new user, check that no application is set to his startup, and
check if the speed is good or bad with that user
-this may seem stupid, but try defragging, who knows...
-check regularly the processes (from all users) to see if any of them is
using an excess of cpu
-uninstall companion softwares for your drivers, such as creative ones (it
is known they give problems half the times)
-some apps will run slower, and you wont be able to do anything at all to
make it better, mainly high-redrawing ones, but also a couple of other kind,
this is due to them not being prepared to some new ways of doing things
(obviously), thus not being 100% compatible
-games will run slower in vista on nvidia, cause their drivers are still not
up to the performance they had (even if they say 9x% it is NOT)
-codec packs may also be causing slow downs, try uninstalling any codec you
installed

i cant think of more, except for a little more thing, but since you are
savvy with computers you should know already: sometimes the OS installations
dont give 100% of its performance, im still not 100% sure why though i have
a couple of theories and info, either way its not a windows only problem and
thought it does not happen so often, maybe a complete reinstall will give
you better performance

hope that you get it fixed

ps. now that i think, maybe is something related to a via-athlon xp
combination since i have that drop in performance also? wathever, i swear i
will never get another via chipset XDDD

 

[Guest]

You first post was clear as crystal Stefan, problem is I lack any
positive answers. You sound very positive about the 1/3 and the clock
stepping thing makes sense but if not that then I can only think of
something like Memory and or the timing thereof.

I has something like this in mind, too. But how to find out if that's the
reason?

I can only switch to lower Front Side Bus frequencies (and already did this)
but this wouldn't solve any synchro problems and alike. And why should this
have a different outcome under Vista than under XP or 2K before?

That would sound like a BIOS setting but you checked all that so I am
stuck with some chipset driver that's making a drastic bottleneck
somewhere. Have you checked the MB maker's website forums just in case
there's a hint there?

Yes, there are Vista drivers for my motherboard and I've installed them. The
problem here is that I can't find any mention of these drivers anywhere in
the device manager after installation. So I'm not really sure whether they
are correctly installed or not.

I am not sure about SLI technology, wondering if there could be a card
or something in a slot that is giving a conflict under Vista that's not
there under XP etc... You picked a good one for sure Sorry the best I
can manage is guesswork

I have no SLI cards if Scalable Link Interface is meant.

And guesswork is always good. I do nothing else.

Thanks!

Stefan.

 

[mhhohn]

Hello.

Since I installed Vista every application and the OS itself runs approx. at
half the speed it used to. It seems to be a problem of the hardware I use,
because I've seen all those apps und Vista itself running perfectly at two or
three times the speed on comparable hardware running Vista or XP.
Additionally every app worked perfectly on my computer when I was still using
Win2000.

For example: A complete rebuild of a project in Visual Studio 2005 needed 3
minutes before. After switching to Vista this rebuild needs more than 10
minutes.

Another example: Every game is running only at half the frames per second it
ran before.

Aditionally every app in fullscreen mode (games) have heavy slow downs after
a few minutes. Under Win2k or XP some game had 60fps, under Vista it has
30fps or less and after a few minutes the framerate drops to sometimes 2 fps,
sometimes 15 fps and sometime to 0.5fps! It usually recovers back to 30 fps
after 20 seconds or sometime not before 3 minutes.

I profiled my own code to find out what might be the reason. I compared the
results to a profiling session of the same app done under WinXP. The
comparison indicates that every call to any DirectX-function (DirectX 9.0c)
takes at least twice the time as normal, sometimes more. Also every memory
memory allocation/deallocation seems to consume more time than usual.

Hardware: Motherboard ASROCK K7Upgrade-880, AthlonXP 3200+ at 2.2GHz,
Gainward Geforce 7800, 2GB RAM, some Soundblaster Audigy Card, Windows Vista
Business 32Bit.

- every driver ist up to date.
- removing graphics card or sound card didn't solve the problem
- updating BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off every unneeded feature in BIOS didn't solve the problem
- turing off AERO completely didn't solve the problem
- all temperatures and fan speeds are ok
- RAM check didn't find any problem
- event log doesn't show any problems or hardware conflicts

Still every software and Vista itself runs slow. I'm out of ideas by now
where I could even begin to search for the reason.

Any ideas are greatly welcome.

Thanks and Bye,

Stefan

I just finished experimenting with game performance, starting from a
minimal XP install. The framerate in bioshock in XP is twice that of
Vista until I install the laptop's power management software (it's a
toshiba x205-sl1), at which point it drops to that of vista, even when
running on the "high performance" option.
After removing this, and a full reset, everything is back to full
speed.

But vista won't let you remove cpu throttling, will it?

-- Mike

 

[Michael Walraven]

Stefan,
Vista will not let you 'remove' throttling but you can set its value to
100%.

In your power options - Advanced setting / Processor power management
section there is Minimum and maximum processor state.
For instance in my High Performance settings
Processor power management
Minimum processor state
On Battery: 5%
Plugged in: 100%
Maximum processor state
On battery: 100%
Plugged in: 100%

On some systems, if the CPU is capable of power control, and it is disabled
in the BIOS then the system will run at reduced speed.

Note than you can see the effect of speed throttling by opening Reliability
and Performance monitor and observing the % Maximum frequency for the CPU.

Michael
Vista Home premium

 

[Stefan]

I just finished experimenting with game performance, starting from a
minimal XP install. The framerate in bioshock in XP is twice that of
Vista until I install the laptop's power management software (it's a
toshiba x205-sl1), at which point it drops to that of vista, even when
running on the "high performance" option.
After removing this, and a full reset, everything is back to full
speed.

But vista won't let you remove cpu throttling, will it?

Thanks for sharing this! Although I don't think that this is the reason
because the motherboard (ASROCK K7Upgrade880) does not support cpu throttling.

Meanwhile I found out that at least the heavy slow downs while playing games
were caused by a pound of dust in the fan of the graphics card. The gfx card
just lowered it's frequencies due to high temperatures.

The perfomance problem of Vista is still there, though. By installing new
drivers for CPU and IDE and by cleaning the gfx card I was able to raise the
performance to 60% to 70% of WinXP.

I installed WinXP in a dual boot in order to compare performance better.
Anyway, since a while I switched back to XP completely and removed Vista. So
the long time of experimenting ended for me.

Still thanks for the information. This is good to know.

Stefan.