Need help speeding up a vista install on an HP laptop

[aphex]

Friend of mine has an HP dv9000 laptop with Vista Home Premium and its amazingly slow for reason i can't determine.

HP dv9000
Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 (1.73ghz)
2gb RAM
160gb 5400rpm Drive
GeForce Go 7600

It takes a GOOD 3-4 minutes to boot, then once in Vista the hard drive chugs away for a good 4-5 more minutes, the fan spins up to full speed as it chugs away. Once its settled down, it seems speedy enough, but then when UAC dims the screen for something, it slows to a crawl again, sometimes it dims for UAC but the actual UAC window doesn't pop up for 4-5 seconds later.

Any ideas? Its so insanely slow, significantly slower than the 4 year old Sony it replaced 🙁

 

[VinDSL]

Only got a minute...

Upgrade to SP1.

Make sure the BIOS and drivers are current.

Get rid of ALL the cruft - the TrialWare, so called!

Install Crap Cleaner (aka CCleaner) and configure it to run @ bootup.

4GB RAM - 4GB ReadyBoost

BBL if I think of anything else... 😉

 

[aphex]

Upgraded to SP1, all drivers and BIOS are current. I've been trying to remove the crap, but its so slow its driving me batty. I clicked Uninstall Roxio 9 about 10 minutes ago, and i've yet to get past the part where it says 'Please wait while Windows configured Roxio...." Its still working, just god awful slow. 🙁

Pulling up Resource Monitor, c:\system volume information\.... under the Write (B/min) tab is up to 158,996,344 and rising. WTF

 

[bsobel]

What scores are you getting for the system, that may highlight the slow subsystem.

 

[Mem]

A lot of the OEM software supplied by companies like HP slow laptops down a lot,uninstall all the crap you don't need,also if you got anything like Mcafee installed remove that ASAP and go with a free alternative like Avira/Avast for AV.

My Dell Laptop boots in under a minute with Vista Home Premium.

Don't forget to run CCleaner too(always worth installing that if you don't have it).

 

[nerp]

With any laptop I own I always burn recovery discs or whatnot then blast the entire thing and install windows fresh. WU is pretty good about getting the majority of your drivers. You'de be blown away by a straight install.

 

[soonerproud]

Hit the windows key and type "msconfig" without the quotations and press enter. Go to the startup tab and deselect everything that is starting when Windows starts up and then reboot. You will get a dialog first that says Windows blocked a program from starting up. Go ahead and allow the program to start because it is a notification from msconfig. You will need to disable or it will nag you every time you start Windows.

Next open Defender and disable realtime protection. You will also want to disable the sidebar from starting with Windows. If that lappy has Norton or McAffee products installed, get rid of them and go to something lighter like AVG. Uninstall any third party firewall because they usually use too many resources and do not provide much better protection than Windows Firewall. I hope this will help some.

You might want to go to device manager and get all the driver information and google each one to see if the component manufacturer has new driver available. A lot of the OEM's like Dell and HP are either slow or never get around to updating to the current drivers. This has been a huge cause of the slow laptop syndrome that Vista suffers from.

 

[VinDSL]

I'm using my lappy right now, and just thought of something else...

I recently got rid of ATI Catalyst. That !&^%$ thing was like a virus in more ways than one!

Catalyst took forever to load - was almost impossible to completely get rid of (had to download a V well hidden utility from the ATI web site to 'disinfect' my machines) - and Catalyst slowed down both the bootup & shutdown times...

Never could figure out what ATI Catalyst was good for, other than eating up resources, so I uninstalled it from all my other (ATI chipped) computers too, and all is good...

Anyway, my Vista lappy works great without it, and its faster too, in my opinion - didn't think to put a stopwatch to it - who would have guessed?!?!?

Er...

And... just to be perfectly clear... I'm obviously still running the latest ATI drivers - I just nuked the Catalyst Control Center, so called.

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: aphex
Friend of mine has an HP dv9000 laptop with Vista Home Premium and its amazingly slow for reason i can't determine.

HP dv9000
Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 (1.73ghz)
2gb RAM
160gb 5400rpm Drive
GeForce Go 7600

It takes a GOOD 3-4 minutes to boot, then once in Vista the hard drive chugs away for a good 4-5 more minutes, the fan spins up to full speed as it chugs away. Once its settled down, it seems speedy enough, but then when UAC dims the screen for something, it slows to a crawl again, sometimes it dims for UAC but the actual UAC window doesn't pop up for 4-5 seconds later.

Any ideas? Its so insanely slow, significantly slower than the 4 year old Sony it replaced 🙁

The Hard Drive is on its way out !! The Toshiba drives that HP put in last year seem to RMA at high rates, They RMA with WD now if that sends any message.