coming to an opinion about Vista

Frank Fusco

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Mountain Home, Arkansas
At this point with my new computer, I don't care for Vista. It isn't just Vista, but other software has gotten on the pop-up warning kick and those annoying things are almost constant. (printer, virus, bot, new programs/changes, etc.)
And, worst, the computer is so slow I feel like I'm back before the first computer I ever owned. That was 1985. It was a Packard-Bell 486, 2 meg RAM running Windows 3.11. Compared to this new Dell it was a jet plane. The Dell is a broke down donkey.
I didn't think my DVD-RW was working properly because I couldn't open or read CDs I made with my previous Dell. So, I call tech support. Well, it does open and read them but it takes about twenty minutes to open one. Once that finally happens, I tried dragging and dropping folders into the new computer. Get this, a folder of photos dragged from the CD window onto my new desktop requires about ONE HOUR to complete the task. Tech support says everything is working OK. I may be short on RAM, only (get that only two gigs) of memory. Guess I will have to add two more gigs of memory to crank this donkey up to slow walking speed.
Color me unhappy. :(
 
Frank - something is wrong, dispite the assurances you're getting from Dell support. I have Vista on my Toshiba laptop w/3 gigs and have no trouble reading older CD's and find it to be a rocket in comparison to my old P2 2 gig machine. Files copy very fast. Look deeper. There must be something else going on.

One thing I did that I'm VERY thankful for - when I bought my machine from Best Buy I paid their $29 fee to have them strip all of the free trials, preloaded crap, and McCafee/Symantic/Norton garbage off the hard drive. THAT makes a big difference - to me at least.
 
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Sounds like you could use some more RAM, but you may be having something running awry on your PC causing issues or a hardware issue. I've got 3 vista PC's and all run very fast, but all have at least 3 GB of RAM.

Do you know if you have the 32 bit or 64 bit of Vista? I was told that currently the 32 bit version only supports 3 GB of RAM, you can have more, but it doesn't see anymore that that. Supposable they are coming out with a patch for that.
 
Vista should run fine in 2GB (and does in my HP laptop). You might want to check and see how much memory Vista thinks it has: if there's a bad chip making it think there's only 1GB, life could get ugly.

First thing to try is shut off the "Aero" graphics effects and see how much difference that makes: right-click on the desktop, select 'Personalize', and then go to 'Window Color and Appearance'. Under 'Color Scheme', select either 'Vista Basic' (Vista-style with the transparency effects turned off) or 'Windows Standard' (which looks like XP).

Second thing is to shut off real-time virus checking and see what happens.

If those two changes don't make a noticable difference, you've got a serious hardware problem.
 
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Frank,
I also have Vista and also quite frustrated with not being able to read cd data disks made from my other Xp machines.
I pop the disk in from the XP and try to open it with Vista and not only
does it display that there are no files on the disk but It asks me if I would
like to format the disk which would wipe out the files that I know darn well are on the disk :eek:
The speed on my computer seems ok, but that's just it just ok. The way that Vista works writing / preparing disks seems slower than my XP.
I feel your pain.
One thing I have noticed is that it reads the xp files just fine if I put them on sd cards?

I will say this... I have not had any problems what so ever with viruses
or spyware that I did have with the XP machine... " Knock on wood......"
 
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Vista should run fine in 2GB (and does in my HP laptop). You might want to check and see how much memory Vista thinks it has: if there's a bad chip making it think there's only 1GB, life could get ugly.

First thing to try is shut off the "Aero" graphics effects and see how much difference that makes: right-click on the desktop, select 'Personalize', and then go to 'Window Color and Appearance'. Under 'Color Scheme', select either 'Vista Basic' (Vista-style with the transparency effects turned off) or 'Windows Standard' (which looks like XP).

Second thing is to shut off real-time virus checking and see what happens.

If those two changes don't make a noticable difference, you've got a serious hardware problem.


Vista knows I have 2gb, the tech support guy, from India, turned off those graphics options. He also turned off my virus and bot protections. I have turned them back on. Would rather be slow than dead.
 
Might have been '86, the year we moved from country to town. Got it at Wal-Mart.
The thing is, in 1985-86, there were no 486s and no Windows. State-of-the-art in those days was 286, maybe 8-10MHZ, running MSDOS (or PCDOS if it had an IBM label on it), but they cost $3-4K and putting in 2MB of memory would push it up another $1K. And mainstream retailers weren't even selling computers yet.

Just as a reference point, I bought a 20MHz 386, 2MB RAM, 70MB disk, in 1988 (for nearly $5K) and spent several weeks on the waiting list for the dealer to get one...didn't see a 486, even at work, until 1991 or so. Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, 3.1 in 1992.

1995 would be about right for the machine you describe, just before Windows 95 came out and the price of Pentium-based machines started spiralling down.
 
The thing is, in 1985-86, there were no 486s and no Windows. State-of-the-art in those days was 286, maybe 8-10MHZ, running MSDOS (or PCDOS if it had an IBM label on it), but they cost $3-4K and putting in 2MB of memory would push it up another $1K. And mainstream retailers weren't even selling computers yet.

Just as a reference point, I bought a 20MHz 386, 2MB RAM, 70MB disk, in 1988 (for nearly $5K) and spent several weeks on the waiting list for the dealer to get one...didn't see a 486, even at work, until 1991 or so. Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, 3.1 in 1992.

1995 would be about right for the machine you describe, just before Windows 95 came out and the price of Pentium-based machines started spiralling down.



Dunno wat to say. Our late in life daughter was born in 1986 and we moved from our rural setting to town before she was one. I joined the computer club and was part of the first group of beta testers for the ISP the local telco was setting up.
I was surfing the net long before she was five years old, albeit very slowly with the dial-up service.
It was my first computer, well second. The first was DOA from the store and I exchanged it.
Color me confused. :dunno:
 
I've been told by someody smarter than me that some of the CDs you can buy are too fast for even some of the newest systems. They can WRITE fast, but can't READ fast. I have some that none of our three Dells can read... even though I burned them myself on the same three systems. Very frustrating. I was told there's an option somewhere you can set to write 'slower'. I just went back to the other CDs. :dunno:
 
I've been told by someody smarter than me that some of the CDs you can buy are too fast for even some of the newest systems. They can WRITE fast, but can't READ fast. I have some that none of our three Dells can read... even though I burned them myself on the same three systems. Very frustrating. I was told there's an option somewhere you can set to write 'slower'. I just went back to the other CDs. :dunno:

Thanks pal. :(
Now, I need a word for super-confused. :doh:
 
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