Very Slow overall performance (during install, bootup, and operati

[Guest]

I run a rig with:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2 GB of Ram
M2R32-MVP
ATI radeon x1950 Pro 256MB
300GB SATA HD

my base line score is 5.1

During install the "configuring desktop" screen on startup takes about
15minutes to finish

During bootup the screen between the window's bootup bar and the vista logo
takes about 15 minutes to end

It takes about a couple more minutes to get to the actual desktop

Once the desktop starts it becomes very non responsive. Minimizing any
window would take about 5-10 minutes to complete. In fact completing any
operation such as trying to run a driver install would render the OS non
responsive.

If, however, i left the computer to run over night without touching it, the
next morning all the operations would be smooth.

At one instance i started my computer at 4:30 (realtime). Both the realtime
clock and computer clock matched at this point. At around 6:30 (realtime)
the computer clock showed that it was 4:52.

When I ran the OS from safe mode everything was smooth.

Also it did not matter if i ran AERO or Classic GUI during normal OS
operation, the performance was just as sluggish.

I have reverted back to XP which runs smoothly.

My baseline score indicates that my computer should be more than enough to
handle anything Vista has.

I've tried installing the 64 bit version twice and the 32 bit version once

Suggestions are welcomed

 

[Kerry Brown]

I run a rig with:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2 GB of Ram
M2R32-MVP
ATI radeon x1950 Pro 256MB
300GB SATA HD

my base line score is 5.1

During install the "configuring desktop" screen on startup takes about
15minutes to finish

During bootup the screen between the window's bootup bar and the vista
logo
takes about 15 minutes to end

It takes about a couple more minutes to get to the actual desktop

Once the desktop starts it becomes very non responsive. Minimizing any
window would take about 5-10 minutes to complete. In fact completing any
operation such as trying to run a driver install would render the OS non
responsive.

If, however, i left the computer to run over night without touching it,
the
next morning all the operations would be smooth.

At one instance i started my computer at 4:30 (realtime). Both the
realtime
clock and computer clock matched at this point. At around 6:30 (realtime)
the computer clock showed that it was 4:52.

When I ran the OS from safe mode everything was smooth.

Also it did not matter if i ran AERO or Classic GUI during normal OS
operation, the performance was just as sluggish.

I have reverted back to XP which runs smoothly.

My baseline score indicates that my computer should be more than enough to
handle anything Vista has.

I've tried installing the 64 bit version twice and the 32 bit version once

Suggestions are welcomed

Performance Information and Tools => Advanced Tools is a good place to
start. Vista keeps very detailed logs of performance information and can
usually identify what is causing performance problems. Of course you have to
be running Vista to do this

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

Assuming you installed this yourself, did the problem first appear when you
first booted, or later after you installed some apps? Have you brought up
Task Manager to see what's hogging the CPU? Disabled the Windows Search
indexing service? Search Microsoft.com for "autoruns.zip" - its a great
program for managing your startup and find out what kind of stuff you have
trying to get your CPU cycles.

The fact that 1) it works fine if you let it run all night, and 2) it works
in Safe Mode, makes me wonder if its the Windows Search service...have you
move a lot of your data to this system and maybe it's indexing it all? I
don't know if this service starts in Safe mode or not - never had to go into
Safe mode yet on Vista...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Guest]

The problem first appeared when i first installed, it would take a long time
to pass the "configuring desktop" screen (forgot what the actual name was).
After that the first boot and the subsequent boots are all slow.

On task manager the CPU seems to be idle, if memory serves me correct. I
think 33% (around 700mb) of my memory was used though.

This is a clean install on an empty hard-drive

I haven't got around to trying to disable the service. But the system
responds way too slow to be normal.

Thanks for the help

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

You might also check your memory - I've heard instances where moving memory
to different slots might make things faster, depending on the motherboard.

Not sure what else to say...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Guest]

Hmmm apparently the performance lag was due to the BIOS. I updated the bios
and now everything works smoothly...very weird, regardless thanks

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

Sure, I can see that, I guess. Sometimes the problem might be in finding
that BIOS update <g>. It's pretty easy from places like Dell or HP, but less
easy from Taiwan motherboard companies...

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Guest]

I had the exact same problem. My system has a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD X2
CPU, 2GB RAM, Maxtor 500GB SATA drive and Windows Vista Home Premium. First
of all during the installation I received a BSOD for driver nvstor.sys. I
went to NVIDIA and got the updated driver nvstor32.sys. I restarted the
installation. Same problem. The only way to get the installation to finish
was to install Windows XP first load the updated nvstor32.sys driver during
the installation and try to do an upgrade. I am using different levels of
Windows now so the upgrade was disabled, but it let me complete the
installation as a fresh copy.

Once Windows was successfully installed, the system was extremely slow.
Could not do anything without it freezing up. I updated every possible driver
I could think of including the BIOS. Same problem. It appears the SATA hard
drive goes into a wait state for a minute or longer before spinning up to
full speed. At that point everything on the screen catches up. Weird. This
happens every 2 or 3 minutes.
I have the SATA RAID capability turned off in the BIOS.

Finally one of my co-workers suggested putting an IDE drive in the machine
and trying the installation again. I did that and everything works great.

I need to know if anyone else has seen this problem with SATA drives and if
so how did they fix it ? I don't want to waste a perfectly good hard drive
because of OS/driver problems.

 

[Guest]

I had the exact same problem. My system has a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD X2
CPU, 2GB RAM, Maxtor 500GB SATA drive and Windows Vista Home Premium. First
of all during the installation I received a BSOD for driver nvstor.sys. I
went to NVIDIA and got the updated driver nvstor32.sys. I restarted the
installation. Same problem. The only way to get the installation to finish
was to install Windows XP first load the updated nvstor32.sys driver during
the installation and try to do an upgrade. I am using different levels of
Windows now so the upgrade was disabled, but it let me complete the
installation as a fresh copy.

Once Windows was successfully installed, the system was extremely slow.
Could not do anything without it freezing up. I updated every possible driver
I could think of including the BIOS. Same problem. It appears the SATA hard
drive goes into a wait state for a minute or longer before spinning up to
full speed. At that point everything on the screen catches up. Weird. This
happens every 2 or 3 minutes.
I have the SATA RAID capability turned off in the BIOS.

Finally one of my co-workers suggested putting an IDE drive in the machine
and trying the installation again. I did that and everything works great.

I need to know if anyone else has seen this problem with SATA drives and if
so how did they fix it ? I don't want to waste a perfectly good hard drive
because of OS/driver problems.