Finally switched back to Vista from XP. Here is why...

[johnpombrio]

I finally was able to switch to Vista Ultimate as my main boot. I had tried twice before but my frustrations were too much to bear. Here is what made it work now for me:
1. Adding 2 gig more memory to 4 Gig. That REALLY seemed to make the major difference. And with memory so cheap these days?
2. Uninstalling Norton Security Center and going with AVG free edition. Norton was just EATING my hard drive access speeds by the tune of 30% slower!
3. Turning off SuperFetch in Vista. It would take forever and a day when booting before I was able to effectively USE my machine. Killing superfetch made that go away.
4. Vista SP1. I donno exactly what they did and I do not care. My boot time is faster, I am able to transfer files faster, and I am able to start programs faster after a boot.
Drivers are available and working, games are running fine now, my hard drive light is not constantly on anymore, transferring files works fine, and general speed for multitasking is about the same as XP is. Good enough for me!

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: johnpombrio
3. Turning off SuperFetch in Vista. It would take forever and a day when booting before I was able to effectively USE my machine. Killing superfetch made that go away.

That's (IMO) one of the best features in Vista, and it only takes a minute or two to fill the cache at boot (on my machine with 2GB anyway). Are you really rebooting that often for it to be such an issue?

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: johnpombrio
3. Turning off SuperFetch in Vista. It would take forever and a day when booting before I was able to effectively USE my machine. Killing superfetch made that go away.

That's (IMO) one of the best features in Vista, and it only takes a minute or two to fill the cache at boot (on my machine with 2GB anyway). Are you really rebooting that often for it to be such an issue?

Agreed!!!!!..SuperFetch is one thing I would not disable,only Defender real time scan I have turned off(set it to scan once a week).

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: johnpombrio
3. Turning off SuperFetch in Vista. It would take forever and a day when booting before I was able to effectively USE my machine. Killing superfetch made that go away.

That's (IMO) one of the best features in Vista, and it only takes a minute or two to fill the cache at boot (on my machine with 2GB anyway). Are you really rebooting that often for it to be such an issue?

Agreed!!!!!..SuperFetch is one thing I would not disable,only Defender real time scan I have turned off(set it to scan once a week).

I also agree. Kill Windows Defenders real time scan, turn off system restore if you have imaging software and leave Supefetch alone. Another thing that might help with stopping hard drive thrashing is tuning indexing to only index the files you will want to search and making a fixed page file instead of letting Vista dynamically adjust it.

A big misconception about Superfetch is it will slow you down if it is working while you are using the computer. This is not true because Superfetch is given a lower priority than your programs, allowing you to work uninterrupted until you are done. Superfetch will be disabled while you are working. The benefits of what Superfetch does outweighs any perceived loss of performance. After a few weeks, you will rarely ever see your hard drive light flash.

 

[johnpombrio]

Here was my beef about superfetch... One of the MOST frustrating things I had with VISTA was that the damn hard drive was always running full blast. I mean the light was on solid and my machine was effectively frozen UNTIL the drive did whatever it was doing (I looked at processes, ran utilities, turned off indexing, killed Norton, killed defrag, killed Defender, killed restore, etc). So I had a nice metal brick until the hard drive was released. That minute or two was like 5 minutes for me.. This would happen occasionally ALL DAY, not just at boot. 5 minutes of brick time every 6-7 hours.
I turned off superfetch and this just plain stopped! Now I have not tried turning it back on since SP1 and the extra memory but I am just too superstitious to try it again.
I know the benefits of superfetch as I have seen how fast an application I just closed will start up.

 

[Canterwood]

Superfetch is something I turned off also on my test rig running Vista.
I don't need or want the OS preempting what apps I'm going to use thanks.
I'll open them when I'm good and ready.

Its taken a good while but I've actually got the rig to a point where I'm fairly happy to use it, but I've had to go through and turn off a bunch of stuff i dont really want.
MS please, please, please, allow us to CHOOSE what we want to have installed on our systems and not just bundle tons of crap some of us don't want or need!