help! vista is violently slow!

thomsbrain

Lifer
Dec 4, 2001
18,148
1
0
Hi guys, sorry if this has been covered, but search didn't turn up anything useful.

I just did a clean install of Vista Home Premium. For some reason that I can't figure out, everything is incredibly slow visually. Even moving the mouse takes ~5 seconds to register on the screen. Interestingly, it sort of seems like the actual behind-the-scenes processing is going at a normal speed, but it just takes forever to make anything pop up on the screen. My processing usage hovers around 25% at idle, but rarely hits 100%, even when I'm installing stuff.

This computer is a dual-boot with XP Pro. XP was installed first, also a clean install. I'm typing this in XP now, and it works fine.

Things I've tried unsuccessfully:
Installing all Windows updates.
Installing ATI's vista video drivers from website.
Turning off "vista" visual theme.

I thought it might be chipset drivers, but the old XP drivers that came with my laptop won't install on vista. My next thought is to try to download generic Intel chipset drivers from Intel's website.

My computer:

Sager 5860 laptop
3.2 GHz P4 HT (desktop chip)
Intel chipset (not sure which one, but it has an 800 MHz FSB).
1 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (Aero approved)

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated. Feel free to ask questions. Thanks!
 

thomsbrain

Lifer
Dec 4, 2001
18,148
1
0
yeah, that's the driver i already installed, with no change.

however, uninstalling the driver momentarily left the computer usable. it was still sluggish in the usual "no video driver" way, but you could use the system. however, after a few minutes, the driver re-installed itself on the fly, went to 800x600, and got all sluggish again. the difference is that now the mouse is responsive, but the rest of the screen still takes forever to reflect changes.

the long and short of it is that this seems to be video-driver related. i am trying various sequences of installing the video driver, and from various sources, and i'll report back.
 

thomsbrain

Lifer
Dec 4, 2001
18,148
1
0
yeah, i did an uninstall and reinstall of the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 driver for Vista 32-bit, and it's still the same deal. :(
 

crossrode

Senior member
Oct 9, 2006
243
0
0
Maybe go to your notebook mfg.'s website and see if there are any chipset drivers you can use there. If you did a clean nstall, you likely get a message from Vista stating your MB driver.OS/utility CD will not work with Vista? Maybe something (system driver, etc.) on that System CD is missing with your Vista install.
 

thomsbrain

Lifer
Dec 4, 2001
18,148
1
0
Originally posted by: crossrode
Maybe go to your notebook mfg.'s website and see if there are any chipset drivers you can use there. If you did a clean nstall, you likely get a message from Vista stating your MB driver.OS/utility CD will not work with Vista? Maybe something (system driver, etc.) on that System CD is missing with your Vista install.

yeah, they only have XP drivers for my notebook. i did install Intel's newest chipset installation utility, and it installed fine but did nothing to solve the problem. i never got any messages about hardware being incompatible, and i have no warning messages in device manager. all the hardware claims to be working properly. i've ruled out the chipset at this point, because all the actual processing seems to go at full speed. it just comes down to how fast the screen is being drawn.

one new piece of information: on one of the display setting screens, it lists my video device as having both 128 MB of onboard memory (correct), AND 255 MB of system memory. that doesn't make any sense to me, since it shouldn't be using any of my system memory. but i don't see any obvious way to change that.
 

crossrode

Senior member
Oct 9, 2006
243
0
0
Have you gone into your BIOS? I dn't know? Maybe just enter default settings? Still sounds like a driver isse at this point. Been running Vista since BETA 1. Some programs work, some don't, especaially older software. How about Device Manager? Any problems there?
 

crossrode

Senior member
Oct 9, 2006
243
0
0
I have an older Intel notebook, I guess Pentium M, I run it with power always on at 1.7 MHZ. It's Windows XP, but the RAM is SLOW. Every diagnosis tool I have run on it says 'RAM is slow. Originally had 128MB RAM! I added a 512 and it worked well. Solved a lot of problems. Now, apparently my video chip is causing my RAM to allocate system RAM inappropriately. I doin't know. The RAM to HD to system caching seems so slow. Any way you can remove a DIMM of RAM and see if the slow down stops? Just a guesss on my part.
 

thomsbrain

Lifer
Dec 4, 2001
18,148
1
0
new things i've tried include updating DirectX... didn't work.

I uninstalled the driver and selected the "delete driver" option, and set windows update to only install updates that i allow. that seemed to slow the re-install process. i was able to use it that way, though it doesn't look very good and there's no acceleration, obviously. but at least the screen refreshes.
 

crossrode

Senior member
Oct 9, 2006
243
0
0
You have tried installing Vista on your HD, not a dual boot install with XP and that didn't work. With your Vista install, it sounds like you are getting a wrong diver(s) from the Vista program. Can you force some XP drivers for your MB, chipset and system? Maybe from the MB Mfg.'s website.
 

Seeruk

Senior member
Nov 16, 2003
986
0
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2 quick tests

1 leave the machine on overnight so indexing can finish
2 disable aero

Then report results :)