New laptop - Random speeds

[gt3911]

Hi guys,

I'd like to pick at your brains...

I've got a new laptop, a HP DV7-1000ea C2D P7350 4GB/320GB More info here...

Overall I'm really happy with this, its a great bit of kit... For the price I think it fits in the market great, as I was looking for a laptop with a large screen, and felt very limited in my choices.

Anyway, so I use it for basic gaming needs, I know its not a gaming laptop, but I like to pushing things hard and this should cope, and when it wants to it does really well, and I'm happy with it.

But this is also my first Vista PC. I'm not sure if I?m looking at Vista issues or laptop issues, maybe its the vista nastiness doing 1000 things in the background.. my problem is, sometimes when loading games / new stages it takes 10 - 20x longer than it should, and other times its perfectly fine. I have the power management on 'maximum performance' to reduce it from under clocking itself, and other than that i'm not sure what to do... I?m just getting very inconsistent performance at times, as I said i'm out the loop i'm not sure whats going on, if vista is being a pain or the laptop.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

sometimes i feel its in 'go slow mode' outside of gaming too. boot ups, logging in, picassa etc just seem to randomly go super slow

 

[mpilchfamily]

Definatly not a gaming rig but yes chances are its got some background things happening that cause the occasinal slow ups.

 

[gt3911]

Hmm, well like I said this isnt a beast, the prices bounce up far to much for good hardware - or the prices are ok, but the screen size / laptop brand fails to impress.

The issue is, I think I almost get a better overall gaming experiance out of an old IBM T41 which I just use as a general work horse.

I'm not sure if theres something in vista I should be disabling, I run the games as an administrator, but atm i'm thinking about just dualbooting it to XP - which i hear is a pig when vista is on first, i'd rather not do this but the laptop itself should be fine, I can only blame the OS right now, it just seems like the hdd stalls.

 

[Pheran]

Did you wipe and reload the system after purchasing it? Usually vendors install a ton of worthless crap that may affect performance.

 

[gt3911]

No, I uninstalled the junk that i didnt require, I presumed that using the partion for a 'reinstall' would only put back the junk... and with alot of ranting about these partions failing to reinstall I didnt feel like bothering.

Someone mentioned to me about disabling quick fetch or smarth fetch? I havent tried this yet, is this quite a common thing to disable?

 

[IlllI]

are you running it plugged in? it probably has to do with power mgmt somehow. if it still acts the same way plugged in then it might not be software related

 

[aceO07]

Disable indexing/fetching and anything else. Google vista tweaks or something.

I had to disable a few services to get Vista running smoother. It wasn't bad on my new laptop, but it sometimes liked to run my hard drive constantly doing indexing or fetching or something. It stopped after I disabled the services. I only have a c2d 1.6ghz with 3gb ram and 7200rpm drive. I'd like to think that my 7200rpm drive helps a bit too.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Originally posted by: aceO07
Disable indexing/fetching and anything else. Google vista tweaks or something.

I had to disable a few services to get Vista running smoother. It wasn't bad on my new laptop, but it sometimes liked to run my hard drive constantly doing indexing or fetching or something. It stopped after I disabled the services. I only have a c2d 1.6ghz with 3gb ram and 7200rpm drive. I'd like to think that my 7200rpm drive helps a bit too.

Are you serious? Maybe disable indexing, but not superfetch. Superfetch should load what you are using into memory before you use it so that your games and applications start up quicker. You have 4GB of RAM, there is no reason not to use superfetch.

Or you could disable it and see what it's like. It can't hurt and you can see if that is in fact the problem.

 

[aceO07]

I only use my laptop for firefox, pidgin, onenote, vlc and vmware. I need my memory for vmware.

I did have superfetch on for a couple of weeks before disable it along with other services. I didn't notice any benefit for me. It may help others..

 

[gt3911]

Thanks guys,

Yep, i'm running this plugged in - i think this might actually be game related issue. I'm gonna see how things go for a little bit trying a few things.

This is my first laptop experiance with a Nvidia card - I went to look for drivers on the nvidia site and failed to find mobile drivers... does this mean I have to wait for HP to publish them? I was hoping i'd of had more driver updates direct from nvidia than having to wait for HP

 

[IlllI]

try this gt http://www.driverheaven.net/nvmodtool.php

 

[BlueAcolyte]

actually, nvidia doesn't make laptop drivers, so you would have to wait for HP to release then... Except if you go to laptopvideo2go It's a pretty popular site; they test new drivers and mod them so laptop cards are supported.

 

[gt3911]

Thanks guys i'll look into that.

The problem is a bit to random to clearly say if something fixed the isue or not yet.

It was super slow yesterday, so instead of 'running as admin' i logged into the admin account and it seemed to run perfectly all day, and then I ran it quickly logged in as a normal user with the 'run as admin' option expecting it to go slow thinking i'd figured it just wasnt happy with this option, and it loaded and ran perfectly grrr