Vista - very slow performance

I know this gets discussed frequently, and I have looked over a ton of older
posts. But cannot find enough good info to apply to this laptop. My
teenager's laptop, a Toshiba Satellite series with Vista Home, big HD, 2 Gig
RAM, usual stuff, runs extremely slowly. It is slow to boot, slow to open
any programs, slow to respond to any mouse action. Overall very slow. I have
another Vista Ultimate laptop, and it is a lot faster than hers. Indexing is
full, Vista came on it so install over an XP solutions don't apply, have
already run typical maintentence stuff like antivirus (Avast), antispyware
(AdAware and Spybot), Windows cleanup, Defrag, and ran scan disk which found
and fixed two bad clusters in files. Defender is active, and she has the
firewall enabled. I had her backup all her files tonight and ran all the
utilities again, and thought I might need to reinstall Vista. Before I do,
can anyone refer me to a website that can give me more ideas to try and get
this thing up to speed?

Thanks

Pamela

did you open (task manager) and check what's running in the backround?
(Avast,AdAware,Defender and Spybot) all running together maybe slowing you down more than you think. just my 2 cents
scrooge

Yikes. Your problem is not half as scary as the solutions.
A lot seem to think of malware.

If your system is slow on startup, this could be a problem, but after
running all those programs, I doubt it.
I hope you're not running all of the malware programs. If so, remove all
but your favourite two, and restart the system.
Avast covers both virus and malware. Keep ONLY ONE virus scanner. More
than one will cause your problem, and likely others.

Then cut down on startup programs. Remove all of them from All
Programs->startup.

My system sped up considerably after turning off the indexing and defrag.
Searches are a bit of a pain, but the weekly defrag is just unnecessary.
Good luck!

....wait up. Where did you get a scandisk for Vista?

"Pamela G" <someone@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ehUksBzDJHA.5060@xxxxxx

Hello Pamela,

You might give these ideas a try to help improve your computers performance.

Speed Up the Performance of Vista

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks all, will double check the websites and suggestions.

I erred, she has AVG antivirus, which doesn't do spyware. And I keep all the
utilities I ran on a separate disk rather than risk them competing.

As far as finding scandisk on Vista, it is well hidden . Go to My Computer,
right click the disk you want to check, go to Properties, then to Tools,
then to Error Checking. THAT is what Vista calls scan disk!

Pamela

> Thanks all, will double check the websites and suggestions.You could try installing a very useful freeware utility called Winpatrol
(available at www.winpatrol.com strangely enough). It makes it easy to see
everything that is auto-starting and to disable items you deem are
unnecessary. You can also view and remove IE BHO's. There are a number of
other features, but startup and BHO management are what I mostly use it for.

The IE cache is set usually set to 50 megs in Vista, but it wouldn't hurt to
check and make sure it's not set to some insane size (often 1 gig on XP
machines). You could also run Ccleaner to delete the garbage files that
Disk Cleanup misses.

You are comparing two computers and say one is slower than the other. Yet,
you did NOT say what CPU's are in each computer nor what speed RAM is
installed in each computer. Just because each computer has the same amount
of RAM does not make them the same. Your computer may well have a
stronger/faster CPU and have more RAM installed that runs at a faster bus
speed.

Complete specs allow others to make a more complete determination of
comparative computer speed.

--

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP
Windows Desktop Experience


"Pamela G" <someone@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ehUksBzDJHA.5060@xxxxxx