XpWindowsVista

After running Vista for couple of days I was a bit disappointed with overall performance and speed of the system. It bothered me that it was actually running much slower than my old Windows XP. Xp seemed to run much faster and I felt the dramatic slow down in system performance. I started snooping around help files for answers and here is what I came up with. Please also read this page for the latest on speeding up the boot time.

1. Performance Score Pay very close attention to it. It's there for a reason and it is not be taken lightly. Watch your score and take notes on which components rank lowest. Processor Speed - Calculations per second Memory (RAM) - Memory operations per secon Graphics - Desktop performance for Windows Aero Gaming Graphics - 3D business and gaming graphics performance Primary Hard disk - Disk data transfer rate

For my processor speed I received a score of 3.7, this is for a pentium 4 2.4 GHZ. It is an older model with no hyper-threading and it is not a dual core. For my memory I received a score of 4.2, this is for 1536 MB of RAM. I was a bit disappointed with this score thinking that with such amount of RAM I should have received at least a 4.5 or even a 5. I guess the amount of memory is not the only thing to look for, you should also look at what kind it is and it's speed. I will let this go and not bother with looking for a better score.

Graphics (hmm), this is where my computer received a lowest score of them all. A lowest score possible 1.0. Yes, my graphics is the area where I should concentrate on most. This goes same for my Gaming Graphics score which was also at 1.0. These scores are based on running an onboard video card with no hardware or 3D acceleration. Please read my page on what difference it made after I installed a better video card here.

After upgrading my graphics card everything had a new beginning. From the moment I logged in to windows it was as if I was using a totally different operating system. Of course, first thing I had to do was to check my score and to my surprise it has jumped to 3.5. Windows Vista rellies heavily on good video graphics, all it's component run heavy duty graphical effects, the slower your card the slower your computer will perform.

I also looked at all the tools available in "Performance Information and Tools" , this is located in control panel and I ran all the checks and tweak everything that was suggested by Vista.Here are a few of them and their screenshots.

Manage startup programs.

Adjust visual effects.

Adjust Indexing.

Adjust Power.

Open Disk Cleanup.

Advanced tools.