[grllprops]

Okay, so maybe about two weeks ago my dad & I bought two of the same Toshiba laptops from BestBuy. It has Vista, but the computer itself is SO slow! And lot of times, windows freeze up. The response time is even slower then my recent laptop, which is like 1&3/4 years old. With viruses!

MY laptop hasn't even come out of the package yet, but my dad set his up already. When he set it up, it automatically it came with a bunch of programs. Now there's 15 icons on the desktop that he doesn't even use, + 3 that he installed himself, and uses.

If you've had this experience, please help!

[SHP]

Vista takes up so much memory that it will slow down computers that don't have at least 1 GB of RAM and a top tier CPU.

I'll take a shot at this and say your Toshiba has an Intel Celeron M CPU and 512MB of RAM? There are ways to speed up Vista, but without a more powerful processor and more RAM, it'll always be slow.

Reformat your harddrive with Windows XP.

That is all.

[Simplicity]

Yep, just because it says it has vista doesn't mean it's good. Vista eats up quite a bit of resources. It's better to just use XP.

[NyCb0i]

I suggest you format with WinXP like SHP said.
It comes installed with loads of bloatwares and useless things.
Toshiba tools (utitilies,blah blah those stuffs that you dont need) can slow bootups and performance, especially for laptops.

WinXP uses less power. Less power = more battery time.
Vista uses Aero. Aero is power hunger. More power = less battery time. And I heard somewhere that you have to disable aero everytime you startup.
Vista is cranky. Slow for laptops.

But choosing vista and winxp is up to you.

I formated/converted to NTFS (it was FAT32 originally)/Nuke it/Partition all drivers to one (it had a hidden drive) my laptop straight out of the box when I bought it. It is much much much faster. You get to choose what to put into your laptop. Now my record booting time for laptop is... about 40 seconds from when I pressed power button. Impressive eh?
Not a lot of junk/startups. Only msn/aim/AV on startup.

[awdark]

Telling people to format to XP is almost telling them to just pirate something. MOST people arent going to be willing to spend the money to throw away Vista for XP. Remember about $50 of the cost of the computer is for the software.

When they load up XP the next question they will post is "What is this genuine advantage thing?! why cant I update my IE or Windows media player??"

Vista might be a little clunkier, but so far I have made my vista work fine. I leave the aero on... startup is fine... everything works. The bootup is a bit longer... but haven't you guys ever considered using the standby option? That thing works great... I restart my laptop once a week and standby the rest of the time.
My only complaint is Nvidia hasn't done .... to try to improve their drivers.

Vista... feels laggy on 512 ram... disable super fetch and that other option and it will run okay even on 512. Pop in another gig... DDR2 sodimm for laptops ~$25/gb these days who WOULDN'T have 2gigs?
CPU power is almost trivial on a vista based laptop.... I dont think celerons are that much of a bottleneck.

Topic Starter: (too lazy to type your name)
Go and uninstall the unnecessary software on the computer.
how much ram do you have?
What Antivirus do you run?

[SHP]

It's okay, I have a list of Volume License Keys on my computer. PM me for info dawg!

[HT2791]

you dont have some antispyware that automatically loads up and scans your notebook, do you?
I remember when I got my new comp, it would freeze for a sec and stuff.

but it really is best to reformat with vista or xp.
get's the bloatware off

[awdark]

Actually you can use the vista disk to do a clean install:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

I just uninstalled whatever I didnt like and im just fine though =\