Why would Vista be so slow?

[Rev Anderson]

I am concerned about two specific operations which are extremely slow.

1. I went to burn a Utility CD with about 200 MB of tools and applications.
On my old XP Pro system this took about 10 minutes from start to finish. On
my new super-fast Vista Ultimate system, Foxconn A7DA-S MB / AMD Quad Core
950 Phenom / 4 GB RAM / SATA DVD - CD Burner, the same CD Burn took over 40
minutes.

2. My Canon Scanner would scan a full color page at 1200 dpi in about 3
minutes. The same operation, with the new Vista driver, takes almost 60
minutes.

Is there something I could have missed in the Vista set-up? This is not a
pleasent situation.

Thanks

 

[D Lirious]

Suggestions:
Vista is slower on most operations that require accessing the hard drive by
up to 20% compared to XP. Anyone who has a dual-boot system, as well as all
printed objective tests, and I have read most of them, where the timings are
listed, verifies this. Vista SP3, aka Windows 7, may or may not fix this.
Your problems are not due to the inherent problems in Vista, of which there
are many, but are particular to your machine.
There is something very wrong with memory management.
You do not write whether you are using Vista 32 or 64. 64 is problematic on
many systems.
If you are not getting BSODs then it is probably not a hardware issue but
you can run the MS memory diagnostic, which is an excellent software tool.
Make sure you have the latest video driver installed. The same for your
peripherals and particularly for your motherboard. The Vista BIOSes for many
AMD mobos, in my experience, are not what they should be so that in practice
many AMD systems seem to run slower than they should, but not as slow as
yours. You may need to reinstall/upgrade the mobo bios as errors in the BIOS
will slow a computer to a crawl.
ASUS makes BIOS updates easy but I have no experience with Foxconn. Make
sure you understand the process or you can trash your mobo.
Make sure mobo bios settings are correct for the type and amount of memory
you have, hard drives, etc.
Make sure you have virtual memory settings correct. If you have a second
hard drive switch the page file to that.
What virus program do you have? Some run frequent background scans that can
bring your system to a crawl. Norton programs can cripple the fastest
machines.
Uninstall Itunes if you have it installed: it is astounding how Itunes can
slow down a computer with all the trash it runs in the background. This is
more obvious on single core machines, however. You may have other background
programs hijacking your machine, inluding malware.
If all else fails reinstall the OS.

 

[Carey Frisch]

Optimize Windows Vista for better performance
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/83ec0ffe-ee04-4d53-8b87-25d1f05c954e1033.mspx

 

[Rev Anderson]

This is a brand new Vista Ultimate 32-bit installation. The hardware is:

Foxconn A7DA-S AM2+ AMD 790GX HDMI MB
AMD 950 Phenom Quad-Core 2.6GHz CPU
2 each G-Skill 2GB 1066 DDR2 (PC2 8500) totaling 4GB RAM
WD Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s HDD
Samsung 22X DVD Burner SATA Model SH-S223F
I kept my Viewsonic VP201b Monitor. I like being able to pivot it to allow
me to see the whole web page while I am working on it.

I turned off services, like IR and other things which will never be used on
a desktop, to help speed up the Vista loading and Memory.

I don't have any AOL or instant messenger services installed or running. My
Anti-Virus is Avast, Avast.com, and it has a very small footprint and minimum
resources are used. Not like the McAfee and Norton Resource hogs, which can
slow a system to a standstill when you least expect it.

The Anti-Virus is the only application I allow to accomplish Automatic
Updates. Everything else, including Vista is set to Manual or is disabled.

Since the listed speed of all of this new hardware put my old XP Pro System,
with 2GB RAM and IDE CD burner, to shame I was surprised when it turned out
to be working so slow.

 

[RalfG]

I would check into the motherboard BIOS settings. A 1200 dpi full page scan
would be over 385 megabytes of data transfer over USB. Three minutes would
be about the right range for USB2 but 60 minutes is more like USB1 speeds.
That could be due to a USB setting in BIOS or trying to send the scan data
through a USB1 hub. I would expect CD burning speeds to be determined the
burning software but it is possible that DMA transfers have not been enabled
in the BIOS settings for harddrives and or optical drives. PIO transfer
modes are a lot slower than DMA/UltraDMA transfers.

Couldn't hurt to take a second look at bus/cpu clock speeds too.