I have recently “had a look” at a couple of laptops which are running slow for friends and dropped copies 7 on them but the vista it was replacing was absolutely shocking. The laptop I am re-installing this morning has got 1gb of memory and a 1.2ghz Celeron, how in the hell did PC world ever sell it this to the public.? Did no one test vista before it was let loose on the public.? I must have sorted out dozens of slow laptops over the last year or two and the main culprit is Vista. Shocking.

I got on fine with vista, seem to be one of the few that did! Ran faster than xp on my machine and looks a lot nicer. 7 is much better though.

It’s not that bad, needs 2gb to run properly though, early vista laptops were shipping with 512mb…

Yes on a decent spec’d machine (of the time), it ran really quite well, but instead they just put it on everything (budget stuff) & it ran rubbish.

Have to say Win 7 runs really really well on older hardware, much better than vista ever did.

Yeah. My other halfs laptop has vista on it, with 1Gig of ram and some kind of Intel celery processor. It’s dog slow. Keep meaning to buy a 2gb thing of ram from Crucial to try & pep it up a bit.

Not sure I wanna spend £100 upgrading it to Win7 though…

if you have a student in the family (even primary school), you can get ‘them’ a copy for much less than that Stumpy

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I remember reading a review by some tech bod on the web who said MS should have shipped Vista with a virus warning on the box, which amused me. He was a Windows specialist, too.

Vista on my daughters laptop and it is brilliant. I can’t think of one occasion in the past 3 years or so that it has hung or failed to perform. No issues with speed either and it’s not a high spec platform. I’m afraid that most/all of the issues are to do with the crap you are installing on to it.

My vista laptop takes much longer on startup than both my kids computers, infact I recently bought a second hand basic dell to work on the car with (on xp) which starts a lot faster than my laptop, I would say however once it has started it seems quick enough, (it just takes about 5 minutes to start up)

My Vista install worked fine, up until I got bored of it and installed Ubuntu. No viruses, no slowdowns, nothing.

I think the main problem was a lack of coordination between Microsoft and the main computer makers, leading to it being installed on under-specced machines. The actual OS itself wasn’t that bad.

I have 4gb of ram and a 1.2GHz dual core processor running Vista and it is bloody slow. Forever hanging, takes an age to start up, I’m talking 10 mins before it is usable. And it really isnt a fan of editing even very simple videos.

I’m thinking about upgrading to W7 in the hope that it will improve matters. I would like to go 64 bit but I would need a clean install and that would mean I would have to set it up on the work network all over again.

druidh – Member

I’m afraid that most/all of the issues are to do with the crap you are installing on to it.

Erm, since the hard drive crashed and we re-installed the OS, the only things we have installed on it are MS Office 2003 & Google Chrome.
So it’s hardly loaded down with crap.

z1ppy – thanks for that. I will look into that!

I’ve got a Vista laptop on the bench at the moment. 512Mb and a Celeron (aka Pantium) CPU. “It’s really slow” – you don’t say.

As the OP says though, it’s not really Vista that’s the problem, it’s the underspecced hardware. With sufficient resources, Vista is generally faster than XP. Starve it of RAM and it grinds to a crawl in spectacular fashion.

Mine is certainly not starved of RAM but it is bloody slow.

There’s something wrong with that.

Microsoft Product in Not-Very-Good Shocka!

I’m not a fan of Vista, the biggest gripe I have with it is not the speed that it boots and runs but the awful copying and moving times. Even a few files seems to take a ridiculous amount of time. Its the first time I’ve had to install a 3rd party program to copy/move.

For anyone else annoyed by it use Teracopy.

“We’re going to die, Roy!”

Cougar – Member
There’s something wrong with that.

I know but I don’t know what it is. I can only put it down to it being vista at the moment. It definately sped up when I upgraded to 4GB of RAM but it is still pretty slow. According to task manager the processor is only running at about 7% most of the time.

I don’t have loads of software on it but do have quite a lot on the hard drive, about 80GB all in I can account for about 30GB of that through iTunes and Photos. I guess about 15-20GB will be Vista but I have no idea where the other 30+GB is being used.

SP2 made a massive improvement in speed for Vista.

Ideally a fresh install, with SP2 integrated into the installation media (can quite easily be done).

XP is still cream of the crop though, when it comes to speed.

I did a complete destructive re-install on the laptop at home and it sped up remarkably. Started to slow down again now though and that’s after around 6 months. Might look into some form of Linux for next time.

Vista Sucks!
Sucks RAM. You need at least 2 GB to get it running acceptably. W7 is far better on all the machines that I have upgraded from Vista.

Microsoft Product in Not-Very-Good Shocka!

Don’t know about that, XP (with SP2+) was pretty good, Vista (despite the reputation) wasn’t that bad, and W7 is excellent. MS Office has no real rival: Excel, Word and Outlook in particular are excellent.

Win ME was pretty awful, I’ll give you that.

My Vista machine is absolutely brilliant. Never once has my shed door swung shut in the wind since I installed it there.