Slow Performance within Vista

Hello all,

I've finally decided to jump on the Vista boat ( or off the XP boat as it may be ), so I've installed Vista64 on my secondary hard drive and have been trying to get it in shape to use all week.

Unfortunately it hasn't been going smoothly. I've had no crashes or lockups to speak of, but my performance within Vista is just abysmal. The windows chug as they scroll around, and launching Internet Explorer is an exercise in frusteration. In particular, any page with a Flash ad running at the top absolutely cripples me.

I'd have to guess that something is amiss with my graphical setup. I'm using an EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS as my display adapter, which is currently rated 2.9 in Windows Aero, and 5.9 for Gaming Graphics. Everything else is right around 5.0. The Gaming score seems on par with what I've heard elsewhere, but 2.9 seems pretty low for Aero. Does this sound funny to anyone else?

I've installed every update available, with the exception of Extras and Language packs. I've gotten the latest Forceware driver for Vista64 ( 169.04 ), as well as all the Windows Update hotfixes that Nvidia reccomends.

Does anyone have any further suggestions that I should try? Or does anyone have similar hardware with much better performance? My specs should be in my signature.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

graphics card is screwing up, are you sure you have the latest drivers? have you tried updating or refreshing your score? i have a 320MB 8800GTS and get 5.9 for gaming graphics and aero performance and havent done any overclocking. Infact my old ATI graphics card got 3.5 and it was a piece of **** lol.

Well, I refreshed my score just before I installed that driver... at the time I just had the latest regular driver for the 8800 from Nvidia's site. The one I just put on is a beta driver, and I think it's the latest one available.

I'll try refreshing again. How important is it to refresh that score anyway?

Well until you refresh the score, the score wont change, it doesnt really matter but right now just to check if its fixed, it will tell us if its fixed or not cause your GFX card should not be getting 2.9.

That score for your gfx card is terible, see here for what others are getting Window Experience Index Scores

Is your BIOS up-to-date? as my mobo was a little screwy until I updated.

No change after another Index Update =(

And still lag-tastic as ever in Internet Explorer.

z3r010, the last time I updated my BIOS was probably a year ago, not long after I first bought it. Is there any particular update that it needs to get along well with Vista?

Thanks for the input guys. Any other ideas?

Just update it to the latest one

check in your BIOS that your Graphics card frequency is set to 100Mhz if the BIOS update doesnt work.

Very strange situation you've got there. Have you tried running a game on there and if so does it run ok?

Sighhh...

OK, I'm hurtin here. I'm trying to take your advice about upgrading the BIOS; I remembered that I'd had some trouble with bad RAM when I intially bought the machine, and had to revert my BIOS back to the default version. So I'm way out of date.

The latest driver on Asus' site is a beta driver, 0801. The last driver before that is 0704. Mine is like 02-something, so I definitely think its worth getting this thing upgraded.

Here's my problem: I cannot, for the life of me, get this machine to flash. On the site, they have documentation for like 3 different app's to flash your motherboard, and I'm not sure if ANY of them are supposed to work, or only a specific app based on your motherboard? In any case, I've tried everything.

I've tried using both AFUDOS v2.11 and AwardBIOS v1.18 and v1.19 with both P5N32SE0801.rom and P5N32SE0704.rom. None of them seem to recognize either of the ROM's as legitimate BIOS files, they spout out barely translated warnings like "Is a Wrong Source File! Maybe System was not new AWARD BIOS version." Are they saying they're incompatible with the ROM? If so, why does ASUS carry them on their website as the BIOS Utility?

From their documentation, it appears that there is also an ASUS Windows Flash utility, but I'll be damned if I can find a link to download it. I should mention that I no longer have the CD which came with the motherboard, which I know is very dumb to have lost =(

Last but not least, you're supposed to be able to run a BIOS auto-installer,( by holding special keys during POST ) which I remember using in the past in my "bad RAM" days. However, after reverting to the barebones BIOS, I can't even seem to do that anymore.


I know this is pretty far outside the realm of Vista at this point, but if any of you guys are really savy about this, I'd be grateful for advice, or even a point in the right direction.

Thanks again for all the help!