Dell Inspiron 5160 - not sure if youall can figure this out...

[Tanner]

Well,

Recently a friend of mine got an Inspiron 5160 2.8Ghz P4 Mobile ( I don't know how it can be both, but it says it is in computer/properties)

another interesting thing to note: on the properties the CPU listed is 2.8Ghz P4 Mobile then UNDER that it says 1.8Ghz...

regardless...of what THAT says, it's THE SINGLE Slowest machine I've seen since a PII 233Mhz machine! I'm not exaggerating.

I liken it to a NEW install of an athlon chip into a motheroboard w/ VIA Chipsets and NOT installing the drivers 😉 Remember how SLOW that was? WICKED Slow!

THIS Laptop, OUT OF THE BOX is THAT slow. Something is not right...any ideas?

few more specs built by dell, opened, powered on, NOT JACKED WITH
256mb RAM
30GB HD
WinXP home SP2


Device Manager top half
Device Manager bottom half
interesting to note in device manager that there are TWO processors...what's THAT all about? Does that have ANYTHING to do w/ the problem?

BEFORE I turned off SPEEDSTEP in BIOS
CPU Speed test
System Properties

AFTER Turning off SPEEDSTEP in BIOS
NEW System Properties

After jackin' w/ the SPEEDSTEP technology there is ZERO DIfference in system performance...(i.e. MSPaint, DVD Software, Solitaire all open very slowly still)

Has ANYONE experienced this kinda of crappy performance form an Inspiron 5160? The thing is bran'flippin' NEW!

help...

 

[ssvegeta1010]

Dells software with XP majorly bogs down with 256MB, believe me, I have a 3.06 Ghz Inspiron 5150. 512 is a MUST, as with 256 you are constantly using the paging file.

Also the dual processors is just Hyper Threading.

And Dells drivers are horrible.

 

[tyim]

Upgrade RAM. You will be amazed. Either that, or turn off all eye candy and xp themes.

 

[trungthiendo]

need a minimum of 512 with dell laptops...paging file always used when you are using 256mb ram...and the hd is very slow...4200-5400rpm if i recall correctly

upgrade the ram, format the hd and the performace will go up

as for the 1.8 that's intel speedstep since its a pentium 4 mobile...it downclocks to save battery life

 

[mparr1708]

It is true that a ram upgrade would serve your friend well. I would also slick the drive. Dell puts a utility partition on there drives that has been known to cause issues. Also they bloat the OS with crud you do not need. Where I work we are an all dell shop and they are good machines but the first thing we do is blow the machine away and image with one of our loads.

Edit:
The statement that all dell laptops need 256mb of ram is inaccurate. I like 1gb in all my machines but a machine can run windows xp just fine on 256mb. It's all relative to what you want to do with the machine. There is no reason it should be slower then malasses in the dead of winter with 256 if all you are doing is browsing the web and sending email.

 

[Tanner]

Originally posted by: mparr1708
It is true that a ram upgrade would serve your friend well. I would also slick the drive. Dell puts a utility partition on there drives that has been known to cause issues. Also they bloat the OS with crud you do not need. Where I work we are an all dell shop and they are good machines but the first thing we do is blow the machine away and image with one of our loads.

I was wondering about that...but I was trying to give Dell the beneifit of the doubt, hoping that they hadn't joined the dark side...guess they have. 😉 I'ma format mine now. 😉 Not sure my friend is up for that @ this point...it's brand new and should work that way!

Originally posted by: mparr1708Edit:
The statement that all dell laptops need 256mb of ram is inaccurate. I like 1gb in all my machines but a machine can run windows xp just fine on 256mb. It's all relative to what you want to do with the machine. There is no reason it should be slower then malasses in the dead of winter with 256 if all you are doing is browsing the web and sending email.

agreed That's what I keep thinking! Why does this machine work slower than the PII 400 that I just got off of? At first I didn't realize it, but the PII Machine served up apps 2-3x faster! Something is just wrong... we're going to stick a stick of 512mb RAM in there from mine and see the difference it doesn't make. I'm certain that it's not going to make a difference, but interested to see what happens 😉

 

[imported_GJ]

Greetings all,
RAM is not the problem here. I personally think something in SP2 is killing it.

My problem :
I have costumers comp. It is very very slow (booting about 20-40 minutes, comp is slow like when you install XP on celeron333 64MB RAM and try to open Dreamveawer, Photoshop acrobat, etc at the same time).
I reinstalled ( with full format, removed dell utility partition, tried to install from DELL and non-DELL XP SP2 CD ) it and believe me I
made everything proper ( this is what I do for living - I installed many computers, I even worked for DELL for few years - ha! )
and everything was great for about 1 day (burned DVDs, played BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH, watch DVDs, worked in Photoshop CS, ripped DVDs, encoded to DivX) then the same thing happened.
No matter how many memory is in there ( I tried 256 - 2 GB with various chips on it ) thing is the same.
Comp is 100% virus and spyware and other malicious software free.


Few other things:
At first in properties there was 1,86 GHz CPU speed no matter working on battery or AC
Installed speedswitch and fixed that problem.
Made all combinations in BIOS between Hypertreading and Speedstep
installed newest bios and drivers
The same thing is happening on 5 or 6 pieces I5160.

Configuration
DELL Inspiron 5160 P4m 2,8 HT, 2x 1 GB DDR, 80 GB HDD, DVD+RW, nvidia 5200 video, XP SP2

My instinct says there is something about SP2 and Mobile HT CPUs.
I know for sure that SP2 made me some problems with some devices (video and NIC cards etc.) on desktop computers

Sorry for bad english.