Vista - base score lower than expected

Hello, i thought i'd pop into this discussion

My laptop is a new HP Pavillion DV2200.
It has 2gbs of RAM at 800mhz
160 gig HDD
AMD Turion 64 X2, 200mhz, 2 core processor


I use my laptop effectively for things like
Jasc PSP
Media Center
Sonic Sound Fordery
And many other high memory usage programs
(they use space for "undo" functions)

if you are thinking of using a PC for file storage/server, i recommend
adding 2 gigs of RAM, at the correct timing, and adding more virtual memory.
With more RAM/Virtual memory, you will be able to use the PC for your
desktop apps, and for file storage.


borlandjr@gmail.com




"PaulB" <PaulB@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:07F66824-0389-4B2C-BD22-83823C0FFC2B@microsoft.com...
> Yes .5GB is considered bare minimum for VISTA. It works okay with 1GB but
> 2Gb
> seems to be the sweet spot.
> --
> Paul
>
>
> "Paul Pedersen" wrote:
>
>> I'm setting up a new computer for a friend. It has a Sempron 3200 running
>> at
>> 1.8GHz and 512 GB RAM (shared with the video, I think) with Vista Home
>> Basic
>> (bottom of the line, I know).
>>
>> The processor score is 3.7, not great but acceptable. But the RAM score
>> is
>> only 2.0. Why is it so low? It's all new equipment from a computer
>> superstore. I don't care about graphics for games, because there will be
>> no
>> games on this computer. But apparently something about the RAM is cutting
>> overall performance by 46%!
>>
>> Is half a gig of ram considered inadequate these days? What can I do to
>> speed up this thing?
>>
>>
>>
>>

My guess is that Windows reports the "weakest link" in the chain of speed,
i.e., the bottleneck, the item to upgrade first to increase overall speed.



"Qu0ll" <Qu0llSixFour@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:enpxcVeuHHA.1188@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> "Andrew McLaren" <andrew@fakeaddress.com> wrote in message
> news:72F7356B-0B03-4F89-B0D9-21518C88C257@microsoft.com...
>
>> Just for comparison, my deskktop box has 3GB of PC4200 RAM, and gets a
>> memory score of 5.4 (and overall score 5.2). I'm usually running a couple
>> of Virtual PCs, and compiling in Visual Studio - both memory-intensive
>> activities, so the extra memory performance helps. It's wild overkill,
>> for email and using Word :-) When I first installed Vista I had an
>> overall score of 2.4 - I had a pretty basic video card which was
>> anomolously low-scoring. > I replaced the video card with a (still pretty
>> moddest) 7900GS video card and the score leapt to 5.9!
>
> My Vista machine scores only 4.7 for the Experience Index even though it
> is extremely powerful with dual Xeons due to the latency of the FB-DIMMS.
> The memory score is 4.7 whereas all other scores are 5.9. I don't really
> understand why Vista simply uses the lowest the score to determine to
> overall index as 4.7 is not indicative of this machine's overall
> capabilities. Surely some kind of weighted average would be more
> representative.
>
> --
> And loving it,
>
> -Q
> _________________________________________________
> Qu0llSixFour@gmail.com
> (Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me)

"Paul Pedersen" <nospam@no.spam> wrote in message
news:e$7upkeuHHA.3476@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> My guess is that Windows reports the "weakest link" in the chain of speed,
> i.e., the bottleneck, the item to upgrade first to increase overall speed.

Yes, that's exactly correct!

The overall score will be heavily skewed by the lowest scoring component. So
if you have a blitzing, quad-proc "11.0" CPU but 256MB of RAM, you'll still
only get a 1.5 score. This is consistent with standard performance planning
calculations, even for very large systems such as mainframes and webservers.
The goal is to identify bottlenecks which unreasonably retard the whole
system.

Cheers
Andrew

On Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:35:31 -0700, "Paul Pedersen" <nospam@no.spam>
wrote:

> I'm setting up a new computer for a friend. It has a Sempron 3200 running at
> 1.8GHz and 512 GB RAM (shared with the video, I think) with Vista Home Basic
> (bottom of the line, I know).
>
> The processor score is 3.7, not great but acceptable. But the RAM score is
> only 2.0. Why is it so low? It's all new equipment from a computer
> superstore. I don't care about graphics for games, because there will be no
> games on this computer. But apparently something about the RAM is cutting
> overall performance by 46%!
>
> Is half a gig of ram considered inadequate these days? What can I do to
> speed up this thing?


How much RAM you need for adequate performance, as always, depends on
what apps you run. However, 512MB is about the very bottom level at
which decent performance begins with Vista, if your apps are not at
all demanding.

Add to that the fact that you are sharing RAM with onboard video, and
your Vista performance is likely very poor. If I had onboard video
sharing system RAM, I would want to have at *least* 1MB of RAM, and
(depending on what apps are run) likely 2GB.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User
Please Reply to the Newsgroup

"Andrew McLaren" <andrew@fakeaddress.com> wrote in message
news:12EFE5D7-9C92-4395-B187-A9CD4198D739@microsoft.com...
> "Paul Pedersen" <nospam@no.spam> wrote in message
> news:e$7upkeuHHA.3476@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
>> My guess is that Windows reports the "weakest link" in the chain of
>> speed, i.e., the bottleneck, the item to upgrade first to increase
>> overall speed.
>
> Yes, that's exactly correct!
>
> The overall score will be heavily skewed by the lowest scoring component.
> So if you have a blitzing, quad-proc "11.0" CPU but 256MB of RAM, you'll
> still only get a 1.5 score. This is consistent with standard performance
> planning calculations, even for very large systems such as mainframes and
> webservers. The goal is to identify bottlenecks which unreasonably retard
> the whole system.
>
> Cheers
> Andrew

How much will a relatively low graphics score slow down the computer if a
low demand is placed on the graphics system?

It depends on the application. An database server might be heavily disk I/O
intensive, for example, but only have a command line interface. The graphics
card will have almost no impact on its performance. Most computer games on
the other hand are extremely graphics-intensive, so they benefit from the
top-end, $900 video cards; but they might not use a lot of Disk I/O, so
having a SCSI-attached RAID 10 disk array won't boost their performance
much.

Vista's overall performance score is somewhat artifical, in that it assumes
a composite, typical workload for a desktop computer. It's still a good
rule-of-thumb measure; a better guide than what most people had before. But
it doesn't purport to be a fully-fledged, performance tuning consultant:
hey, those guys charge per hour :-)

Most office applications, like Word and Excel are basically 2D graphics, so
having whizz-bang 3D graphics cards are of little direct benefit. Vista's 3D
Aero graphics provides some performance boost, even without specific 3D
features (pixel piplines etc), because DWM permits off-screen composition,
etc; which benefit any application. The amount of benefit is proportional to
the amount of graphics processing and IO the app needs to perform.

The video card would have no impact on your system's performance as a file
server. But if you want to run Photoshop or similar image processing
applications, these are very graphics intensive: so they will probably
benefit from a better graphics card. Desktop publishing will be slightly
less graphics intensive, but they would require more graphics grunt than
just running Word or email.

Systems with an integrated graphics processor (ie, on the motherboard, not a
separate card) and shared system memory, are generally designed to run basic
desktop applications - email, web browser, Word and Excel. It's just a
cost/benefit trade off. Given that your system has a Sempron processor,
512MB RAM, and shared video memory, it is in fact, a pretty low-end system
(although adequate for basic desktop tasks) - so I hope it was pretty cheap,
too. For the applications you describe, I personally would have gone for a
bit of a more grunty machine - 1 or 2GB RAM, Intel Core Duo 2 CPU, and a
dedicated graphics card. But if you're running a business, and counting the
pennies ...

If the machine has a spare PCI-E slot, you can drop in a better graphics
card any time in the future; you're not locked in.

By the way, the resource requirements you're seeing on Vista (1-2GB RAM,
etc) are pretty typical for all modern opertaing systems: Vista, Mac OS X,
Linux or Solaris. I have 2GB RAM in my Mac mini, and at least 1GB in all my
Linux boxes. There are some variations (some people argue Linux can run on
less powerful hardware), but overall, you're in the same boat with any OS.

Cheers
Andrew

"Andrew McLaren" <andrew@fakeaddress.com> wrote in message
news:0ADA0359-F1A9-4515-A34A-00EE578E914F@microsoft.com...
> It depends on the application. An database server might be heavily disk
> I/O intensive, for example, but only have a command line interface. The
> graphics card will have almost no impact on its performance. Most
> computer games on the other hand are extremely graphics-intensive, so they
> benefit from the top-end, $900 video cards; but they might not use a lot
> of Disk I/O, so having a SCSI-attached RAID 10 disk array won't boost
> their performance much.
>
> Vista's overall performance score is somewhat artifical, in that it
> assumes a composite, typical workload for a desktop computer. It's still a
> good rule-of-thumb measure; a better guide than what most people had
> before. But it doesn't purport to be a fully-fledged, performance tuning
> consultant: hey, those guys charge per hour :-)
>
> Most office applications, like Word and Excel are basically 2D graphics,
> so having whizz-bang 3D graphics cards are of little direct benefit.
> Vista's 3D Aero graphics provides some performance boost, even without
> specific 3D features (pixel piplines etc), because DWM permits off-screen
> composition, etc; which benefit any application. The amount of benefit is
> proportional to the amount of graphics processing and IO the app needs to
> perform.
>
> The video card would have no impact on your system's performance as a file
> server. But if you want to run Photoshop or similar image processing
> applications, these are very graphics intensive: so they will probably
> benefit from a better graphics card. Desktop publishing will be slightly
> less graphics intensive, but they would require more graphics grunt than
> just running Word or email.
>
> Systems with an integrated graphics processor (ie, on the motherboard, not
> a separate card) and shared system memory, are generally designed to run
> basic desktop applications - email, web browser, Word and Excel. It's just
> a cost/benefit trade off. Given that your system has a Sempron processor,
> 512MB RAM, and shared video memory, it is in fact, a pretty low-end
> system (although adequate for basic desktop tasks) - so I hope it was
> pretty cheap, too. For the applications you describe, I personally would
> have gone for a bit of a more grunty machine - 1 or 2GB RAM, Intel Core
> Duo 2 CPU, and a dedicated graphics card. But if you're running a
> business, and counting the pennies ...
>
> If the machine has a spare PCI-E slot, you can drop in a better graphics
> card any time in the future; you're not locked in.
>
> By the way, the resource requirements you're seeing on Vista (1-2GB RAM,
> etc) are pretty typical for all modern opertaing systems: Vista, Mac OS X,
> Linux or Solaris. I have 2GB RAM in my Mac mini, and at least 1GB in all
> my Linux boxes. There are some variations (some people argue Linux can run
> on less powerful hardware), but overall, you're in the same boat with any
> OS.
>
> Cheers
> Andrew

Thanks for the help. The choice of machine was not mine, but my friend's.
Upgrading RAM to 2 GB should help. If his graphics performace is too slow,
we can get a card.

My XP Pro home machine has 1GB. I used to think that was a lot.

<snip>
>
> How much improvement can I expect to see by just increasing the amount of
> RAM?
>

<snip>

Increasing the amount of RAM is not a "just" type of proposition. It's the
whole kit and kaboodle, so to speak.

Try that first. If issues are encountered with editing video, then try a
video card with more dedicated RAM. I've done video editing on this PC which
has a boatload of shared RAM with the system and it's worked fine. But I've
not pushed the edge of the envelope when it comes to video editing... so I
can't say for sure whether the system in question will benefit from a video
card with dedicated vid RAM. (And don't get me started on drivers... LOL!)

Good luck!

Lang