Your comment is worth more than 2 cents
| This is a "Gravatar enabled" site. You can go to Gravatar.com and sign up for your own. All sites that use this service will then show your beautiful new likeness. Oh, and HTML is disabled in comments. So DIE SPAMMERS DIE! |
Dave! You rock! Thanks so much for the added tips. I’m always looking out for ways to improve my laptop’s performance. Just streaming a movie from Netflix occasionally experiences some weird video display issues like there isn’t enough memory. I’m starting to think maybe 2GB isn’t enough. I’ll look into those power settings you mentioned. I do believe I have it on Power Save in order to extend battery life.
2GB is plenty adequate for VIsta, you just have to tell it how to use it properly. With some machines you will have to get pretty techie to get the best performance out of your machine - messing about with clock speeds and such in the BIOS and other potentially lethal things in the wrong hands.
Being a laptop (and based on a problem my sister had with her Dell Inspiron 6400), media player/streaming lags and other slow-speed performance issues may be related to overheating. This problem is alot more prevalant with laptops, due to the fact that the air intake is in most cases on the bottom. If you actually have it on your lap, you can sometimes block this off entirely. Also, if you have an easily (and safely!) accessible fan/heatsink assembly, this should be regularly checked for dust build ups. That last point also applies to PC’s.
In short, don’t write Vista performance issues off as software problems straight away. Alot of problems are caused by Microsoft’s laziness and desire not to spend any money, but not all of them…
I have two furher things to add to this, and both of them are general vista tips rather than specific to laptops, but certainly the first one will make a huge difference to the performance of a laptop.
1) There are two settings hidden in the advanced power settings in Vista called “Maximum Processor State” and “Minimum Processor State”. The settings control how much of your CPU power can be used at any one time. By default the “Maximum...” setting is set to 50%. This means that your computer cannot ever use more than half of the processing power available to it, which has obvious performance impliations.
I would imagine that Microsoft have done this for power saving purposes - upping the Max State will use your battery faster (How much faster depends on many factors, to numerous to go into here). I understand the default has been changed to 100% on the Vista SP1 Integrated clean install, but have not yet been able to check this myself.
To access these settings you must start the power settings through control panel, then change advanced settings for the relevant “power profile”.
2) Windows Vista networking has what Microsoft call “support for the next-gen tcp/ip stack”. What this translates to in real terms is a load of functions that have been added for IPv6, which cause havock on networks that are running pure IPv4. (If you don’t know what this means, that pretty much means your on IPv4. 99.9% of networks in world [at the time of writing] are still based on IPv4).
The upshot of this is that you may find some applications/functions to do with the network do not work properly. Things that I have come across so far include:
- Unable to load any https pages
- Unable to connect to IM service (eg MSN, AIM, and even some irc channels)
- Unable to connect/very high ping for online gaming servers (particularly CS/Source)
- No returned packets on ICMP Ping
I have resolved these and a couple more problems with the following step:
Start > Run > cmd (Or Start > Programs > Accesories > Command Prompt)
then enter the following command:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
This disables Recieve Window Auto-Tuning (RWAT). If you want to know more about this then google it (I have lost all my reference links).
If the above command doesn’t resolve your problem, or creates more, then you can try:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=high
To return the function to its default setting use:
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal
To view the current state of the RWAT (and some other TCP functions) use:
netsh int tcp show global
NOTES:
- “int” in the command can be interchanged with “interface”. this makes no difference to the command, its just more to type.
- This setting has an annoying habit of changing itself, either back to default or to some other setting. Often this will not affect the functionality of programs, but sometimes it does. This seems to be highly dependent on the router (although what aspect of the router I have no idea), as all machines using a particular router tend be set identically.
If you want more details on either of these two nuggets of information I recommend you Google it - I have lost all my reference links for them (well, they’re on a computer I can’t access from here).
daverandom | 05.14.2008 | 5:38 AM