PC >> Vista on VAIO gets annoyingDespite my initial love for Vista, it's starting to annoy me. Don't get me wrong, I love the changes to the OS, but it really does appear to need a very modern computer, and clearly my VAIO can't just hack it. It seems to suffer from random drops in performance; all of a sudden, the hard drive will start going crazy. I've had a search and it seems I'm not alone. I suspect this is something that 'older' computers suffer with. Sometimes it's very quick, but others it's very sluggish, and this is with a faster hard drive, 1GB RAM, and 2GB ReadyBoost. Except for a bigger ReadyBoost drive, there's not much more I can do, and I don't think it's worth the money. How much more difference can more than 2GB ReadyBoost make? I'm strongly considering returning to XP, and keeping Vista for my next computer (which, incidentally, will probably be a desktop built by myself, rather than another notebook). Aero is disabled, as it transparency, so they aren't to blame. I don't think there's a lot more I can do to smooth things over. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know, otherwise it'll probably be back to XP in a few weeks... Update (17 June 2007)A reader emailed me a couple of weeks back and informed me that disabling aero might not be as beneficial as one would think. In fact, it may even be detremental to the system's performance. The theory is that when you disable aero, the CPU is used to render the screen, rather than the GPU. Unfortunately, I've gone back to XP in the mean time, but I will definitely test this theory over the coming weeks. He also said that ReadyBoost gave no noticeable improvement in speed. I can certainly say it did for me. The only outstanding issue, which still has not been resolved, is VAIO Power Management. I know for a fact that this is not an isolated case, and clearly there is an issue with the application itself. Getting Sony to even agree to this is near impossible. I can say for certain that their support is very poor, despite them being considered a 'premium' manufacturer (although this is not really the case these days). Update (5 August 2007)I've now had a chance to test the above theory, and it seems to have improved performance. I have aero enabled, but have turned off transparency as it is a major resource hog. I am now running XP and Vista on a dual-boot system, and may well return to Vista as my sole OS if the good experience continues. The End of the VAIOI came to the conclusion that my VAIO just wasn't powerful enough for Vista, and gave up trying to get it running well. I sold it and am going to build my ultimate PC instead. |
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