Review: A week with Vista on a slower PC

By aydc
in Microsoft (Windows)

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aydc

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Almost everyone who reviewed Vista here seems to use very fast high end PCs. For people who wonder how it works on relatively slow PCs, here's my experience with Vista and a quick comparison with XP, plus some tips to make it faster on low end PCs:

My computer:

Athlon XP 2400+

768 MB DDR333 RAM

Radeon 9700 PRO Video Card (256MB)

I'm going to be upgrading to a Core Duo system soon, but this baby has kept me satisfied for close to three years now. Under Windows XP, I can run any application and play any game fast enough, after turning down the quality settings a bit. The only game that snubs my system is Oblivion, but it's engine is a programming disaster anyway. ID software could have gotten the same engine to get three times more fps on any system.

So, this system varies from fast enough to very fast on Windows XP, depending on the application. 768MB RAM is more than enough. XP boots under 30 seconds and Luna interface is very very fast.

Fast forward to Vista Ultimate... It had been sooo long since I heard my hard disk going trrrt trrrrt trrrt fumbling with the swap file. As soon as I installed it, I was amazed how much time it took to boot. It needs more than a minute from a cold start to load everything. Applications start slowly too. There's almost always virtual memory activity in the hard disk, since Vista Ultimate needs 800MB just to run itself, and my system has 768MB.

Aero performance is great though. My card supports DX9 and it gets 4.9 from the performance measurement tool. The interface works as fast as XP, maybe even faster, and looks much more beautiful too. If you have a DX9 video card with 256MB RAM, you have nothing to worry about Aero, no matter what your CPU is.

I tried a few games. Need for Speed Carbon kept crashing, and Neverwinter Nights 2 worked OK, but it was slow. I didn't worry about it and didn't test much since the drivers are still beta and I expect both DirectX and OpenGL performance to rise substantially with the final drivers.

So, on such a system, the default Vista Ultimate installation takes ages to boot, very long to shut down, and runs applications and games slowly, compared to XP Professional.

What did you do to improve the performanace you ask? I turned off everything I don't use, of course. This being Vista Ultimate, it has every imaginable service plus the kitchen sink. There are over 100 services from which around 50 are set to automatic start. I turned around 20 of them to disabled. Then I had my eyes set on the Windows Sidebar. This thing adds 10-15 secs to my boot time, and isn't good for much. I stopped it from loading automatically, saving performance and screen space. Then I turned off Windows Defender, which is useless to someone who is used to AdAware anyway. I turned off window minimize maximize animation which speeded up my interface further. I applied a few other small tweaks and turned off a few other RAM wasters.

Ta da... I shaved off around 20 seconds from my boot time. My physical RAM usage is down to around 500MB when fully booted, and everything that doesn't require much free RAM seems to work almost as fast as it does in XP.

So, if your computer is similar to mine, don't be afraid to use Vista, but tweak it to improve the performance. I'm looking forward to comparing this to the Core Duo system I'm planning to buy this week.

Edited by aydc
Grand Master

azz0r_wugg

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Who'd have thought an operating system released in late 2006 wouldn't run well on older hardware :rolleyes:

Please, I know people expect things to scale well nowerdays, but an OS isn't a game, its a large hunk of an operating system that wont run well unless its fed enough processing power and memory.

Its time people start realizing that just because you can run something modern on something old, doesnt mean you should.

It always bothered me that people whined about Half Life 2 stuttering on there old hardware, only to find they have the graphics set to high because it let me.

Not a complete response to your post, just whining about Vista performance in general.

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Chicane-UK Veteran

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Sorry azz0r_wugg but I think your post is completely ridiculous.

The OS should be able to scale well according to the hardware its put on. I would expect games to demand the latest in graphics and processing power, but would not expect an OS to put even more demands on a system than a high end computer game. I mean seriously.. what does Vista do (graphically) over XP other than transparent Windows and applications and a few fade in / out effects?

Sloppy implementation and bloat are not good excuses for poor performance of an OS IMHO..

The one sided (and head in the sand) attitudes of some members around here leaves me lost for words so often.

Enthusiast

lwebster_2000

Posted
Posted

totally agree- this is a very worthwhile review that most people here will appreciate. I personally was curious how vista would run on a lower end pc.

Vista is designed to scale, and this review gave us a sample of how well it does - what the fricken hell is wrong with that? Moron.

Nice review - cheers!

:)

Grand Master

Kushan

Posted
Posted

Thanks for the article aydc, that puts my mind at ease a little as I'm stuck in a bit of a rut when it comes to upgrading to vista

(system specs are 3400+, 1Gb of RAM, 6800Ultra, should be good enough but the RAM is the weak point). I think after reading that I'll definitely dual boot for a while.

And azz0r, I completely agree with Chicane - there's no excuse for an operating system taking up so much resources like that. And just to point something out about what you're saying about modern OS's not scaling - windows 2003 doesn't use half of the system resources that XP does, yet the only applications that wont work with it that will work on XP are stupidly made ones that directly check for certain OS's and decide not to run just because they've never heard of windows 2003. That's why so many people prefer running a server OS as a desktop OS and when longhorn server comes out, I'll be looking into it for that very reason.

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aydc

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Not a complete response to your post, just whining about Vista performance in general.

OK, you make valid points. But what amazes people is not that it doesn't run fantastic on older PCs. What people don't understand is how it wastes so much ram and not do anything that XP can't do. Let's look at the example I gave in my post, Windows Defender. Running a program like adaware takes around 10MB on XP. In Vista, we have Windows Defender which kills at least 50MB, doing the same thing. Ditto for Windows Firewall. Agnitum Outpost or ZoneAlarm on XP is much better and take less resources.

Even if we're in late 2006, it's shocking and obnoxious for an OS to take 800MB RAM and 1GHz processing power just to run itself.

Despite all that, as I said in my post, you can turn most of the new stuff off. Of course, the obvious question is, what's the point of upgrading to it then? A Windows XP with WindowBlinds seems to be a much better option than Vista right now.

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aydc

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I couldn't disagree more. I've got a similiar system (AMD Athlon XP 2700+, 1 gig ddr 2700, ati radeon x800 pro), and it runs great. Faster then XP for both boot times, and general usage, and games.

Your system is better than mine so it should work a bit faster, but I find it hard to believe that Vista runs faster than XP on it.

Do me a favor. Click on My Computer icon in XP and measure how long it takes to open. Do the same in Vista and compare. In my system, XP opens My Computer in 0.7-0.8 seconds and Vista takes around 2.0 to completely load.

If you still say XP and Vista are similar, the following possibilities come to mind:

a) Your XP has some kind of problem. It runs as slow as Vista.

b) You are running Vista Basic or Vista Starter

c) You have used some dark magic to optimize your Vista installation

d) Someone sold you a Core Duo Extreme 6800 + GeForce 8800 and said it's AthlonXP2700 and Radeon x800, and you believed him.

Edited by aydc
Proficient

kingroach

Posted
Posted

Vista runs fine in older computers if you dont run games etc. I have P4 2.26 Ghz with 512MB RAM and radeon 9550. After disabling some useless services and firewall ( I have hardware firewall), windows defender my OS ram usage is around 330MB and with internet explorer and office 2007 open it takes about 420+ RAM. I only use the pc for web surfing and writing college papers so it works for me ( xp is still my main os though)

Proficient

username();

Posted
Posted

Vista Ultimate needs 800MB just to run itself,

FYI you're wrong. Vista will cache a huge amount of RAM, and will not use it. The second an app requests it, it is made available (actually faster then if it had never be allocated by the OS).

Grand Master

HawkMan

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Just as an FYI, Vista Ultimate or nay other Vista, does not take 800MB ram just for itself at startup, even if you got that much and more ram, not even close.

and most vista apps peopel claim use more ram doesn't, but it may appear they do as the vista mamory handlgin give every app a lot of ram for pre-fetching, ram which isn't claimed and will be given to anythign else that requests it when needed.

so as for speed and all that, I dunno, but the memory comments and statistics provided in this thing are way off.

Grand Master

jakem1

Posted
Posted

Your system is better than mine so it should work a bit faster, but I find it hard to believe that Vista runs faster than XP on it.

Do me a favor. Click on My Computer icon in XP and measure how long it takes to open. Do the same in Vista and compare. In my system, XP opens My Computer in 0.7-0.8 seconds and Vista takes around 2.0 to completely load.

If you still say XP and Vista are similar, the following possibilities come to mind:

a) Your XP has some kind of problem. It runs as slow as Vista.

b) You are running Vista Basic or Vista Starter

c) You have used some dark magic to optimize your Vista installation

d) Someone sold you a Core Duo Extreme 6800 + GeForce 8800 and said it's AthlonXP2700 and Radeon x800, and you believed him.

aydc, I'm running Vista on an Athlon XP 2600+ with 1.5 Gb of RAM and I would say that my boot times are maybe slightly faster than XP but after that it is much faster and much more responsive. If you can, try upgrading your RAM (it's pretty cheap these days) and you should notice a huge difference in Vista and in XP (assuming you are dual-booting.

Now I must admit that my XP installation was starting to get a but long in the tooth and bogged down and was probably ready for a reinstall but Vista is a real pleasure to use on this PC.

Explorer

csmager

Posted
Posted

aydc, I'm running Vista on an Athlon XP 2600+ with 1.5 Gb of RAM and I would say that my boot times are maybe slightly faster than XP but after that it is much faster and much more responsive. If you can, try upgrading your RAM (it's pretty cheap these days) and you should notice a huge difference in Vista and in XP (assuming you are dual-booting.

Now I must admit that my XP installation was starting to get a but long in the tooth and bogged down and was probably ready for a reinstall but Vista is a real pleasure to use on this PC.

Similar story here - I have an Athlon XP 2400+ with 1.5Gb RAM using an old 9600 card, and it's as fast if not faster than XP.

I would suggest the OP finds some cheap RAM to improve the experience. Either that or it's woeful chipset drivers (I just installed Vista on an Athlon 64 3500+ system with 1.5Gb RAM, and it runs slower than on the 2400+!)

Contributor

Tom B

Posted
Posted

I have a system very similar to yours and vista runs great.

AMD XP 2800+ (Barton core)

1gb PC3200 DDR

Radeon 9800 Pro (128mb)

Vista runs fine, it boots way quicker than XP ever did and its equally fast once it's loaded.

I can't see how it can run so comparatively slow for you. I can do many CPU/Mem intensive things at once and the OS is still as responsive as ever.

At the moment, I'm watching a video in ratDVD format (this is taking up almost 60% CPU on its own) and downloading a fair amount of large torrents at decent speeds (300 KiB/sec+) and this takes a decent amount of memory and CPU usage.

Vista runs no worse than XP, it uses slightly more CPU power while idle and more a bit more RAM while running but overall it's fine on my PC.

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aydc

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I don't think we're all talking about the same thing when we say "It runs great" or "It's slow". As I said in my post, if you have a decent video card, the interface runs very fast. The windows open and minimize very fast. Transparency effects are beautiful and have no speed disadvantage. That's because they run solely on the video card and have very little to do with the rest of the system.

However, anything that involves RAM and long hard disk access is much slower than XP.

I've turned almost every service and security system off. I'm using a bare bones Vista now. I don't think it can go any leaner. Even so, my RAM usage right after boot is 480MB! That's physical RAM usage, not cache. You can see these on the task manager. So on a 512MB PC, you'd have around 30MB physical RAM left for programs. On XP, you'd have around 300MB left.

I'm not talking out of my ass here. I'm giving numbers and statistics. I'm telling you exactly how I setup my system and how I got the numbers that I'm getting. So please do the same instead of posting "No, Vista runs great on my Pentium 100Mhz."

Apprentice

eleeter

Posted
Posted

Just as an FYI, Vista Ultimate or nay other Vista, does not take 800MB ram just for itself at startup, even if you got that much and more ram, not even close.

Vista DOES take up about that much on bootup. I know from first hand experience. Now one can argue that the OS is caching, but what exactly it is holding in a cache if it takes up 800 megs on a cold boot? Actually the memory usage of Vista is very strange. At times, my memory usage (with no apps running) dips as low as 500 megs. Other times, it hovers around 1 gig or more with no apps running. I suppose the OS could be caching certain elements to make the previously run applications start faster on next launch, I'm really not sure. But does it actually speed up application launches? I don't see or feel it myself.

I have a good frame of reference because I am dual booting WinXP 64 bit and Vista 64 bit. WinXP has much lower memory usage, and to be honest I don't see any speed advantage using Vista. Maybe a little bit, but nothing earth shattering. I did see speedups when going from WinXP 32 bit to the x64 version of XP. Especially when launching applications like Photoshop CS2, which is a hog in every respect.

IMO Vista piles on the extra processes but really they do nothing for me and just take up memory. For example, TrustedInstaller likes to stay in the background doing who knows what, Licensing Service is also always running, there are about twice as many svchost.exe processes running vs. XP. Windows media player and Media Center have a bunch of processes that like to run, even when I DISABLE the services. Hell I resorted to renaming wmpnscfg.exe because the facking thing kept running no matter what services I disabled. I don't NEED media player sharing services on this system.

I have a daily workflow where I use 6-7 applications at once, on XP I have a memory footprint of about 8-900 megs. On Vista, 1.5 gigs or more. 100% exact same programs running. So what does nearly twice the memory footprint give me over XP? IMO not all that much.

Don't get me wrong I like Vista x64, but I believe the memory usage is unforgivable and MS could have and should have done much better.

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aydc

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In no way do I mean to curb your tweaking efforts, but I'm fairly certain that Vista continually optimises it's boot sequence. Subsequent restarts should be faster and faster (to a degree). I certainly noticed this on my Athlon 64 3000.

Can it be placebo? I didn't notice anything. The program that I want to start faster is Firefox. On my system, it takes around 10 seconds to load. I have started it hundreds of times on Vista until now. The Superfetch feature should have learned that this is a frequently used program by now. Nope. It still starts in 10 secs after a cold boot. No difference. Like eleeter said, I don't know where all that RAM goes...

Apprentice

eleeter

Posted
Posted

I have noticed that Vista has sped up somewhat over time. It does boot fast alright, but so does XP-x64. I would like to know what is going on with memory usage. As I mentioned, I've seen memory usage @ 500 megs and over 1 gig, just sitting there idling, no apps loaded. Why the huge difference? Right now with Firefox open using up about 80 megs, total usage is at 900 megs. That's a hell of a lot with nothing at all going on with the system.

Grand Master

trek

Posted
Posted

I have noticed that Vista has sped up somewhat over time. It does boot fast alright, but so does XP-x64. I would like to know what is going on with memory usage. As I mentioned, I've seen memory usage @ 500 megs and over 1 gig, just sitting there idling, no apps loaded. Why the huge difference? Right now with Firefox open using up about 80 megs, total usage is at 900 megs. That's a hell of a lot with nothing at all going on with the system.

if you read any of the literature on the changes to memory management in Vista you'd see that since caching is now implemented, the current memory usage is deceptively high. As others have said, as more programs are launched, the amount of cached items are reduced and the memory is freed for those applications to use.

XP runs without caching commonly accessed memory locations so you cannot compare the two just by the raw number anymore.

Further, upon first install of the OS, the indexer uses quite a bit of CPU time rebuilding the search index. As it completes that process, you should see performance increase; at least in regard to lower CPU usage while idle.

Experienced

Punio4

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I'm running a Barton 2800+, 1GB 333 DDR, and an x1600pro 256MB.

So far, I haven't seen any *need* to upgrade my cpu. Maybe I'll pump up my ram a bit... And the gpu is just fine.

I'll let you know how it turns out, since I am an optimisation freak myself on XP, when I get my grubby little hands on Vista.

It will probably come out on MSDNAA when it hits the stores.

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