Ducati Monster Forum

Compaq laptop, running Vista.

Physical memory running ~80%, about 400MB.

how much physical memory?

Task Manager says 501 MB Total, ~125 MB Cached, 4 MB free.

This is a common problem with Vista. We have several really high end laptops that run pretty crappily with Vista on them. Up the memory x2 and you will see some improvement.

I'm running XP, and my old laptop is still holding its own.  It's about 3.5 yrs old, though, so I'm thinking it's due to be replaced.  (1 gig of RAM, 40gb hdd)  I avoided Vista, but I'm going to have to upgrade sometime soon.  Haven't yet decided between a Windows 7 machine or a MacBook Pro.

I've noticed that Firefox has been bogging down a bit lately.  Not catastrophically, but it's plenty annoying.  :-\

don't forget, vista/server 2008/win7 have a completely different memory management strategy.

not having free physical memory isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I recently got a Lenovo G530 with XP that runs dandy

(derby is your go-to guy on your memory issue...i used to be smart with 'puters  :P)

If I shut down FireFox, physical memory use drops by about 130 MB.

I just don't remember this lappy running that high before.....

Oh, and this lappy was about $500, purchased ~3 years ago, so it's no powerhouse.  [laugh]

one thing to go with firefox under options is to disable checking and downloading automatic updates.  Seems to speed it up.

mitt

OK, just did that, will see if it helps.

Thanks!  [beer]

you're trying to run vista on 512MB of memory? that can't be right.

On the subject of firefox, after being a longtime user, I have now switched to Chrome full time.  It seems to be faster and more conservative of resources, it might be worth a try for you.

What does your CPU utilization look like?  I'll also suggest spyware or a virus since  high CPU or memory utilization are symptoms - especially if performance has dramatically changed over a short period of time.
But since you are already light on memory, running additional protection without identifying a specific problem may hurt more than it may help.  Just don't go loading every spyware removal tool you can find in hopes that it will improve things, is what I am saying...

HP/Compaq Presario C500
Intel Celeron 520@1.6 GHz
502 MB RAM
32-bit

you need a LOT more memory. 2GB if you can swing it.

i may have some laying around for that machine...

That was my first thought.

My computer knowledge is quite limited, but my computer was running slow, often showing 100%.  The problem was something was wrong with explorer and it was continually attempting to download windows updates.  I downloaded explorer again and all was and is fine.  Just something to check.

Listen to the Derby man, you need more memory. I'm sure there's room for streamlining what you've got running - kill off things running in the background etc.. but 512mb is pretty low, doubly so if you're running vista. Memory is cheap, and the speed gains will be great if you jump to 2 gigs or more

Yeh, 512 is about the bare minimum needed to run XP SP3, let alone Vista.

mitt

http://www.apple.com (http://www.apple.com)

+1  [thumbsup]

An Apple isn't going to happen.  ;)

This lappy came straight out of the box with Vista, but being the cheapest thing I could find at the time, I'm not surprised it's low on hardware spec.

Well it was probably spec'd out for XP but got a drive with Vista in the end. Like the 05 620s - we'll call ti a transitional model year.  Either way, you're best off getting some more memory and doing some house cleaning.

there's a good program to look up what memory your lappy takes at crucial.com

Good customer service too  [thumbsup]  My laptop memory was on back order, and would take an extra week to get, so they knocked a couple bucks off.


mitt

Get me a model number for your laptop and I can just about 100% guarantee you  have 2gbs laying around for it i will send to you.

Vista "prefetches" the most common stuff you use and stores it in the RAM so that it doesn't take so long to load. Kind of like when you are cooking something, it takes alot less time if you have all the ingredients sitting on the counter instead of spread out all throughout the cupboards.

And the hatred for Vista is mostly a hold over from those who had bad experiences (or have no experiences at all but listened to friends who had issues) at the outset. Vista, with a few tweaks has been a pretty dang good OS and suffered growing pains very similr to those XP had when it was released.

can you forward me info on those vista tweaks?

My lenovo laptop freezes apps and crashes something EVERY day.
and runs slower than the XP machine that was 3 years older that it replaced.
(example- as i was writing this went into personalize desktop to see if there were eye candy items i could turn off to speed things up. crashed explorer  :-\)


memory info- Crucial/Micron warehouse is just down the road from me  8)

Xp prefetches also - right?

I am receiving 7pro next week - just not sure I want to install it yet on my puter, since we use Autocad 2006 at home...

mitt

XP's prefetcher was primative to say the least using the pagefile for it's prefetch instead of the RAM itself.

And probably the 9 best things you can do to speed up a Vista computer:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm (http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/supertweaks.htm)