Two cases of poor performance - why ?

[aussie-revhead]

Hi guys , my boss recently bought a Dell E6300 based pc for home use and he has told me that it is less than impressive in the performance stakes and that his old p3-550 with XP felt faster than his late model dual core with Vista , is Vista making it feel slow ? It has 1GB of ram , is this enough for normal use ie internet ? Will it run faster with XP ? Or should he be complaining to Dell support to see what they say ?

Secondly , my current rig has been running great for a few months now ( since current config) but as I didnt do much internet work with it and I wasnt sure which anti-virus to use I didnt install anti-virus until recently . I installed AVG just so I had something on here but it now takes about twice as long to boot up , making it feel like an old crapbox ( I like fast bootup ) Has anyone else had this problem ? What anti-virus do you use ? Is one type faster than another ? This isnt a big problem , just annoying , so any input into either of these would be great .

[Tenoq]

Any AV slows your machine down, and the big names are the worst (Norton, McAfee, etc). AVG is fairly demanding too, although I'm surprised it's slowed it down as much as you say.

The best AV performance-wise (and effectiveness is excellent too) is NOD32. It's free to try, but it is a pay solution if you want to keep using it. Give that a go, and see how your system performs. IMO it's nearly as good as running no AV, on a modern-ish system.


As for your boss, tell him to format the thing to get rid of all the Dell spyware/malware/adware/bundleware that is included with name-brand PCs these days. Vista IS no doubt slowing it down, and like-as-not it'll be the graphics slowing it down more than anything. Does the system have a dedicated graphics card? If not, disable Aero and then see how it performs. XP WILL perform faster, but really a C2D system with 1GB should be adequate for Internet/word processing tasks.

[aussie-revhead]

As I had nothing to do with my bosses purchase other than telling him to opt up from a 820 to a 6300 so its his problem mostly , but Im curious too , if he formats etc and does a clean install will it effect warranty ? If he rings for support and things are missing , or XP has been installed will it become invalid ? I think my boss got the upgraded video card option ( 7300 pfft ) . Isnt aero disabled by default ?

I have another 6300 pc here with AVg and 1GB ram and it runs fine so I know 1Gb is OK for XP , but not sure on vista .

Cheers .

[aussie-revhead]

Trying NOD32 now , still slows the pc down eh .... nice and fast without AV .

[puca]

anti virus continually run in the background its a trade of if you continue without anti virus and get a virus it will be 10 slower

[SLi_dog]

Trend Micro PC-Cillin is supposed to good for not using a lot of system resources.


As for your boss, I'd say as he's not overclocking it's seems slow. The C2D at 1.8Ghz is not a massive improvement over the old Pentium chips.

[Lardman]

It wouldn't be the Antivirus.

Many people I've spoken to (Enthusiasts, Programmers, Uni students, Computer store owners etc) Basically say a rule of thumb with vista is to use 2-4x the amount of ram that you'd use to run a windows XP PC smoothly.
Vista is in general, a slow OS, so it'd definitely run faster under XP. (I dual booted XP on my laptop to test this, It's definitely a RAM use issue)

as for a slow boot, my somewhat harsh response would be to live with it.

some things you can do however are"
MSConfig to kill any un-necessary processes is always a quick and easy fix. (Start > Run > msconfig) - I wouldn't try this unless you know what processes and what not that you're disabling.
And also CrapCleaner
www.ccleaner.com
Defragmenting your hard drive can also help
Good luck!

[NismoR31]

Originally Posted by aussie-revhead

As I had nothing to do with my bosses purchase other than telling him to opt up from a 820 to a 6300 so its his problem mostly , but Im curious too , if he formats etc and does a clean install will it effect warranty ?

warranty only ever covers hardware faults, so you can be safe knowing you can do whatever you like to the software without voiding anything.

[aussie-revhead]

Originally Posted by Lardman

It wouldn't be the Antivirus.

Many people I've spoken to (Enthusiasts, Programmers, Uni students, Computer store owners etc) Basically say a rule of thumb with vista is to use 2-4x the amount of ram that you'd use to run a windows XP PC smoothly.
Vista is in general, a slow OS, so it'd definitely run faster under XP. (I dual booted XP on my laptop to test this, It's definitely a RAM use issue)

as for a slow boot, my somewhat harsh response would be to live with it.

some things you can do however are"
MSConfig to kill any un-necessary processes is always a quick and easy fix. (Start > Run > msconfig) - I wouldn't try this unless you know what processes and what not that you're disabling.
And also CrapCleaner
www.ccleaner.com
Defragmenting your hard drive can also help
Good luck!

My slow boot isnt due to anti-virus ? I removed AVG and its fast again , installed NOD32 and its slowed down but not as much as with AVG . Why modify msconfig when it boots fast without antivirus running ?

[g3monster]

I run an anti virus program called kaspersky Antivirus...Seems alright a little bit of slow down but not really noticeable in day to day applications and it only takes about 10-20mb ram in proactive defence mode.

[RILEYP]

no antivirus in 5 years and loving it....
boots so fast.................
if you want to learn about virus removal just set up an old pc and start googling for playstation or nintendo roms or porn or a serial for xp or vista
and click on as many links as you can find
click yes to any pop ups and install the suggested programs.
then when ie has its home page disabled to some other crappy thing and ctrl/alt /del is disabled and you keep getting pop ups telling you your pc is infected rarara and your pc has the clap disable your lan port and start in safe mode
remove what you can with ad/remove programs.
then run spypot
and then hijack this
and remove al the crap

then restart and goolge the ones your unsure about
and do a registry clean...
Im no expert but my pc is pretty clean I think

easy as....

[aussie-revhead]

I have been through that with my kids computers , not with porn , just with crap they download from the usual sources , then they go " dad , why is this computer so slow ?? "

Then spybot says 1214 infections ....

[gmturner]

Originally Posted by g3monster

I run an anti virus program called kaspersky Antivirus...Seems alright a little bit of slow down but not really noticeable in day to day applications and it only takes about 10-20mb ram in proactive defence mode.

i use Kaspersky Anti-virus aswell, cant fault it in any way, can set the amount of protection etc but either way i never notice it unless its doing one of its pre-configured scans.

been running kaspersky now for about 4 years, without any virus problems. after havin norton for about 2 and having virus prolems and having norton mess with networking and what not.

As for vista, its definately more resource intensive and will make machines not up to the task run like absolute shit. i would say get your boss some more ram, maybe a USB flash drive running readyboost.

[toe2toe]

Originally Posted by SLi_dog

As for your boss, I'd say as he's not overclocking it's seems slow. The C2D at 1.8Ghz is not a massive improvement over the old Pentium chips.

Are you kidding or what? You're saying going from a p3-550 system to a E6300 isn't a massive improvement? The old system would be at least 7-8 years old by now...