Dell Inspiron 1720 w/Vista... Glacially slow..

[Fumesucker]

My daughter has a Dell Inspiron 1720 with Vista, she thinks the laptop is just fine but moving from a distinctly low end machine with XP to her laptop is unbelievably frustrating, it makes sloths look positively speedy. Son in law also doesn't think the thing is doing what it should for a dual core Pentium with the specs it has.

I know doodly zip about Vista, is there any reliable guide I can follow to perhaps tweak this thing so it performs better than a 386 with two megs of ram?

[paparush]

1. Turn off all the bling in Vista.

Here's a handy list:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/make-vista-run-faster.htm

I'm sure you could spend 5 minutes on Google and come up with several more.

[hobbit709]

2. Has it been decrapified?

Dell bogs them down with all sorts of "free" offers and other shit.
Get this here and run it.
http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

[Fumesucker]

6. LOL.. That's a good link, I'm going to try that out.. n/t

[Old and In the Way]

3. How much RAM?

I bought my kids both a low end HP laptops for school. They're really nice machines, but only came with 512MB of RAM. They have Vista and it was way slower than my XP laptop. I added another stick of 512MB RAM and they have no problems now....

[Fumesucker]

5. It has a dual core processor and two gigs of ram..

Which is why I get so frustrated with the machine, it really should be a lot faster than it is given the hardware.

[paparush]

7. With two gigs, it should not be dog slow.

You can try turning off all the Aero bells and whistles and as the other poster said, retailers load TONS OF USELESS CRAP on new machines, most of which is set to start up when you boot.

On your machine, go to Start-Run and type msconfig and hit enter.
When MSCONFIG launches, click on the Startup Tab.
Look at that LONG list of apps and services that's set to start when you boot.
Uncheck things like "DELL Customer Experience Service", "Google Toolbar Notifier","Adobe Acrobat Speed Launcher", etc..

[Betty88]

8. That should run fine

check out Blackviper.com great site for Vista, and all windows, configurations.

[Fumesucker]

9. Thanks for the link to Blackviper.. Bookmarked.. n/t

[Betty88]

4. Ram really is key with vista

It will run on 512 and better on a gig. you will notice a world of difference at 2 gigs and if you want to see it run the way it should get 4. Turning stuff off also helps but you really need the ram, no way around that.

[wildflowergardener]

10. Inspiron

I don't know if this could be an issue, but my Dell Inspiron laptop model had a history of overheating - and I believe that the processor downgrades to a lower speed when it gets too hot - which could make it run slower. I downloaded a program I found out about online that will show you the temperature in the status bar - I don't recall the exact name, but I read about it on one of the dell message boards.

Also I put it up on a couple of small boards underneath at each side so the airflow was better. I don't know if that could be the case, but you never know.

editing: my model was 5150

Meg

[Fumesucker]

11. Well.. we've done a reinstall of Vista from the backup partition..

Run the decrapifier and some of the things Blackviper writes about.

Also put a 2GB thumb drive in one of the USB ports to act as more virtual memory, the light on the C: drive and the thumb drive both flicker constantly when you are doing almost anything on the computer, which leads me to think that there still is nowhere near enough RAM in it..

It's faster than it was but still painfully slow if you are used to a machine with XP that runs pretty well.

The next step is to install two more gigs of RAM (pc2 5300), I've located it for a pretty decent price on Amazon.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.