My little misfortunes with Vista Ultimate

[javier]

I have an old Dell Dimension 8200 (original P4 2.26Ghz, 512MB Rambus RAM,
nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB, 2 HD one 80GB and one 60GB), bought in Aug
2002 with WinXP Pro.

Suddenly I realized that I would like to test drive Vista Ultimate so I was
getting prepared, one month ago I bought a new 80 GB hard drive to replace
my older primary one, with eBay helps I could find 1GB of hard to find
Rambus memory, but since they only work with pairs I had to remove 256 MB so
now my computer has 1.256 GB Ram, and finally a couple of days ago I bought
a Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon card with 256 MB ram.

I ran the Vista Upgrade advisor and told me that will be issues with my
network and sound cards (I thought the network card would be a mistake, that
card is almost a commodity, it would be odd that would work in a new OS like
Vista.

So I was ready (or so I thought) and made a clean install of Vista (that
install was smooth, I must add), but after it reboot by the last time I had
no sound and no network (damn!) although Aero work pretty good and the
sidebar looked great (the first gadget I put what the CPU and ram monitor),
because I was very concern about the performance of my computer with Vista.
I got winxp-vista compatible drivers and the network was on again (one
problem over). But to get the SoundBlaster Live 5.1 work on Vista was a real
pain in the .... I had to use 3rd party drivers that only restored 2.1 sound
and no microphone input and since I used Skype a lot that is no good for me,
and they even didn't installed ok, since I recieve an error message
everytime windows starts.

Eventhough I installed my main apps: Office 2007 and Creative Suite 3 Design
(yes, the whole enchilada with Photoshop Illustrator, Dreamweaver and so
on), Pccillin Internet 2007 and I stopped there even I still have to install
Nero 7, just to check the performance.

In the couple of days that I've been using this system I noticed a very high
CPU usage (almost or 100% when I am using apps as basic as IE7), eventhough
a very adequate ram usage (less than 50%). My network connection is very
slow (I have to click several time is a link to reload the page because it
takes a long to load it), I have a DSL 1Mb. and sometimes it stops and
starts again.

Right now I feel dissapointed, bored and tired of Vista and I probably will
go back to XP, but I am wondering if upgrade my memory to 2GB will improve
something since I can not upgrade the CPU nor want to. Maybe I could also
buy an audio card approved by Vista but if my Vista performance won't
improve even with 2GB ram, then better go back to XP and stay that way until
I buy a Mac.

Any hints to improve the performance with Vista or do you think better stay
away from it?

Thx.

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

There are a lot of ways to improve Vista's performance. I turned off the
Sidebar on my laptop - that saves some percentage of CPU cycles, especially
if you have the slideshow applet running. I also disabled the Windows Search
service - so it would quit hitting my hard disk all the time. I downloaded
Microsoft's utility, Autoruns, to see exactly what gets run on startup and
turned some of it off. I also downloaded TweakVI and used it for some misc.
tweaks.

I'm sure there's more I can do. In your case, don't those Rambus sticks have
to be a _matched_ pair? If so, see if you can find another 1gig stick to
match what you have. Which Radeon card do you have?

I'd also suggest hitting ATI and Creative every week to see if there's new
drivers. I had no idea Creative didn't have drivers for this board...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Andy]

Rambus RAM, matching pairs are required. if you have 2 - 1gig sticks it'll
make a huge difference with Vista, not sure how you're getting what you got
down there. I would go back to your 2-256mb sticks for now.

Vista is gonna run slowly, so turn off Aero, sidebar, etc. Your video card
is pretty last gen, not sure if it'd be worth the investment to upgrade it
at this point as you'll have to get an AGP card and if you ever decide to
get another PC chances are good it won't have a AGP slot in it. Maybe if you
can find a used last gen card like a 7900 GS AGP for cheap you can snatch
that up.

SBLive 5.1, I haven't tried to use my Audigy 2 in Vista yet, but I know
Vista will accept Windows XP drivers. So pretend you're in Windows XP when
downloading drivers, you might have to right click on the driver files and
set compatibility mode to WinXP SP2. I've heard SB cards just aren't quite
ready for Vista, not sure what to suggest as an alternative, but I know Best
Buy sells a generic sound card for $30 (Dynex label) and has a 30 day return
policy.

As for your Geforce card, go to nvidia.com (not ati) click download drivers,
and follow the prompts.

As for your Apple desires, good for you, given what you want to do, OS X is
a good choice. See if you can hold out til Leopard.

-a.

 

[KDE]

.... and turn off the cpu sidebar gadget ! running a memory hog all the
time to monitor memory usage is very counter productive.

 

[Charles W Davis]

Cal Bear '66 just posted this. Soundblaster drivers available today:
http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/

 

[javier]

Touché!

 

[javier]

According to Creative, my card SBLive 5.1 is under No Future Development
plans to make Vista drivers.

So my question is: Do you think it would be worth to get one 1GB ram more to
make vista work better or because of my P4 2.26Ghz processor Vista won't
work no matter what?

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

I'd say your CPU is fine, but it would definitely be better to get a matched
pair of Ram sticks...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP