Why did my system performance rating drop?

[Skypix7]

I have Vista Home Premium newly installed on an Asus P4PE, P4 3.06C, 2GB DDR ram. It was running aero and other things okay, driving tgwo monitors with the Geforce 6600 Vista driver, then Photoshop and Bridge started crashing, and after several reboots, some resets, Vista downgraded my performance from 3.8 to 2.5.

Anybody have any idea why? It says the graphics score was dropped, but it was high before, even without the geforce drivers.

Am I just up against the resources wall?

I have a new system comiong in a week, a quad with 8GB ram, looks like I'll need them. Meanwhile I have a lot of images to process in Photoshop CS3, any suggestions how I can speed this thing up?" It won't even offer Aero any more.

Also, I couldn't find where to switch off window animation, any help there?

Thanks!

 

[bsobel]

Won't offer aero? Score dropped? Sounds like you have the wrong drivers for your video card loaded somehow (older drivers perhaps)?

 

[Skypix7]

Everything's rocking now.

My rating is 4.9 on the new system, but that's the graphics and gaming graphics number. All the others are smokin': processor 5.9, RAM 5.3, Primary hard disk data transfer rate 5.6.

Photoshop CS3 Bridge opens and creates hundreds of high rez previews in around half a minute. For a test I opened 16 RAW images in Photoshop, adjusted some values, then hit the save. It used to take 3-5 minutes for those 16 images to save.

With the new rig it's about 1-2 seconds per image, or half a minute max. That's what I was hoping for.

new rig:

P5W DH Deluxe
6600 Quad,
8GB DDR2 667,
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS w/512MB,
lots of hard drives (2 SATA and 2 IDE, 1.3 TB total),
two 19" LCD monitors,
600 watt power,
and
Vista 64 bit.

All my ram is recognized, after a couple days wrestling with different patches and configs.

Vista is solid as a rock so far (4 days), no BSODs, only problem remaining is how to add more DVD burners to the one I have. The system won't boot when I add one or two, not sure what to do on that.

I'm very impressed with Vista so far. It's beautiful, sexier than XP, Aero is cool. I still haven't figured out how to stretch one image across both monitors yet, although I've configged it in GeForce driver as dual monitor.

I'm not complaining though, I'm very very happy with the speed and power of the system and Vista so far.

 

[PepperBreath]

I remember that installing nvidia's forceware drivers dropped my game performance rating like .5 points from the windows drivers. That was about a week or two ago when I was experimenting with Vista. Back to XP for the moment.

 

[Skypix7]

I had the same problem, and it was the drivers. They're a bit flaky. The screen flickers dramatically on boot up too, and Nvidia says this is normal. Disconcerting though.

My techie who sold me the computer said that the very best thing you can do with Vista new installs is let it find the correct driver for your hardware. It's really a vast improvement, he says, over XP in that regard, and will often find and install better drivers, or more compatible drivers, than the ones you'll find digging around on your own.

Re: the rating drop, some other techie I talked to told me that you have to deselect one of the video card drivers, as there was for some reason two of them installed. I still don't know how this happened, probably when I was trying to find the right driver for my 7600 GS card, but one I did that, and redid my rating, it went back up.