Vist Premium Performance Upgrade

[tallman45]

A Manufacturing firm I work with need to boost performance on their desktops

General Office apps an especially Quickbooks are their primary apps

They run Vista premium in E4500 rigs with 2gb ram, single 200gb Sata drive and Onboard VGA (Intel X3100 )

Question is

I read that the onboard VGA is a bottleneck for Vista, even a cheap $50 Pci-E card will elimate that as a problem

Or

Should I add in another 2gb of Pc2-5300 (2 empty slots so an easy upgrade)

Best bang for the buck if I only had one to do ?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: tallman45
General Office apps an especially Quickbooks are their primary apps

They run Vista premium in E4500 rigs with 2gb ram, single 200gb Sata drive and Onboard VGA (Intel X3100 )

Something is seriously wrong. My laptop is a 1.6GHz Celeron (540?) with 1gb ram and Intel graphics (845 I think), and it doesn't have any lag problems in Vista when using general applications.

-Make sure all drivers are up to date
-Check for viruses, spyware, and anything else that runs at startup.
-Disable all eye candy; make it look like Windows 2000 (this will reduce ram usage by upwards of 200mb, honest to god)
-Check if the hard drive is thrashing; that means the lag is caused by Windows indexing. It goes away after a few days.


There's no reason for a computer that powerful to lag when using Quickbooks.

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: tallman45
General Office apps an especially Quickbooks are their primary apps

They run Vista premium in E4500 rigs with 2gb ram, single 200gb Sata drive and Onboard VGA (Intel X3100 )

Something is seriously wrong. My laptop is a 1.6GHz Celeron (540?) with 1gb ram and Intel graphics (845 I think), and it doesn't have any lag problems in Vista when using general applications.

-Make sure all drivers are up to date
-Check for viruses, spyware, and anything else that runs at startup.
-Disable all eye candy; make it look like Windows 2000 (this will reduce ram usage by upwards of 200mb, honest to god)
-Check if the hard drive is thrashing; that means the lag is caused by Windows indexing. It goes away after a few days.


There's no reason for a computer that powerful to lag when using Quickbooks.

Everything you need to do is listed right here! Good advice ShawnD1!

Also, note that adding another 2GB of ram won't improve your performance much(if at all) in Windows Vista. The systems will likely only see anything close to 3.5GB of ram, so you'd essentially be wasting one of those sticks. The setup you have already for those workstations should be eating Vista alive for what you need to do.

 

[loup garou]

What version of Quickbooks, is the company file local or hosted on a server?
What antivirus software?

 

[tallman45]

QB 2006 and NAV 2007 each runs separately one ach machine

There really is not a problem, the question was meant more as "For $50 would a dedicated Vid card or +2gb be a worthwhile investment"

Sounds like the extra 2gb would not, but would a dedicated vid card be ?

One benefit would be DVI connections over VGA should they want to upgrade monitors

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: tallman45
There really is not a problem, the question was meant more as "For $50 would a dedicated Vid card or +2gb be a worthwhile investment"

One benefit would be DVI connections over VGA should they want to upgrade monitors

No and no. The video card will only make a noticable difference when doing video rendering. That and pretty much all monitors have VGA connectors. I'm using a 22" LCD, and the standard connection for it is VGA.