New Asus Laptop

[Riley'sLife]

I’ve owned a laptop for 8 years and it has been invaluable, traveling with me throughout the Pacific, the Americas and Asia. Marketed in the UK as an Advent sold by PC World, it was made in Taiwan and is known in the rest of the world as an Asus 8400. CPu is P3 with 256Ram. O/S is Win98se. I mainly used it for email, internet, writing (Word), photo edit and storage (Photoshop), games, playing DVDs, etc, until it died recently

I’ve just bought a new Asus A8S made in China with Centrino Core2 Duo T7300 CPu 2.0GHz (4mb L2 cache), 800FSB, 1 Gig Ram, Nvidia8400 graphics card etc., all designed for the installed O/S Win Vista Ultimate.

Apart from its appearance and feel being far less rugged than the old one, if anything, it seems to be so much slower. It takes ages to start up. When it looks ready to use, it isn't, as when I hover the cursor over, say, the desktop Word icon, the egg-timer icon is displayed. When the egg-timer eventually disappears and I click Word it takes ages before Word opens. “Ages” in this context means at least two or three times longer than my old laptop.

The HD on the new laptop was partitioned into three by the dealer, and many programs were installed for free on two of the drives. I know Vista is far more advanced and CPu/RAM hungry than Win 98se, but so far this new laptop purchase seems to be a retrograde step on my part.

I have been shutting down using Hibernate which eliminates the lengthy delay on subsequent start up, but should I be making some alterations to anything else to “tune up” the performance speed? I am not computer savvy at all. Anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers Rick

[youngkiwi]

Make sure Vista is set to run in "High Performance" mode. Just click on the power/battery icon on your taskbar to adjust the power settings.

[Riley'sLife]

Thanks for that tip YoungKiwi. It has always been set to High Performance however. The only alteration I have made from standard is to lower the display brightness. Any other ideas? Am I expecting too much? I thought speed had improved vastly with these high-ish spec laptops. Does Vista make things slower? Cheers Rick

[george]

You need more RAM, add an additional 1GB, and you will see the difference.

[OM3N]

Hi there.

Is there any particular reason that you choose to run Vista? I believe that unless you want to be playing Directx 10 games (Which your video card does support, and I am very jealous of ) there are very few reasons to use Vista. I would definitely venture a guess that Vista is responsible for at least most of the slowdown you are experiencing. If I was in your shoes, I would back up any data you need to and reformat to XP, it couldn't hurt, and I bet that it would def. help your situation.

[cdnvic]

Hi there.

Is there any particular reason that you choose to run Vista? I believe that unless you want to be playing Directx 10 games (Which your video card does support, and I am very jealous of ) there are very few reasons to use Vista. I would definitely venture a guess that Vista is responsible for at least most of the slowdown you are experiencing. If I was in your shoes, I would back up any data you need to and reformat to XP, it couldn't hurt, and I bet that it would def. help your situation.

That would be foolish. Just add a GB of ram and it will be fine.

[britmaveric]

Have 2GB and then 4GB USB with the ram readyboost. My ASUS G1 is lightening fast.

[Riley'sLife]

Thanks George. So it must be Vista soaking up all the RAM? Very frustrating to buy a new laptop and find it to be slower than an 8year old one. But I guess they are all designed to a price rather than perfect performance. Back to the dealer it is then!

Om3n thanks. Yes there is a reason for Vista. This is my second new Asus laptop. The first one was returned to the dealer for a full refund after it was found that I couldn't connect to my TOT Dial Up connetion. Asus said that they were aware of the problem with the Motorola internal modem having a conflict with a weak TOT landline signal (which is what I have in the village!). The dealer had installed XP on the first laptop. I called Asustek in Bangers and between me and the missus we got the answer from their techies that they would replace the modem chip- no doubt with an older type- and test the laptop with a weak TOT signal somewhere on the outskirts of Bangers, but they insisted that the model I have was designed for Vista, and that is what I should use. I didn't want to be without a laptop for weeks on end so got my money back and then bought a new identical model, but this time had the dealer instal Vista. The Internal Modem wouldn't work still, so I now have a USB external modem which works fine. I bought this model for the Direct X 10 games as you rightly guessed (among other reasons too!). Ironically, I haven't been able to load a single game yet, but maybe that has more to do with their pedigree rather than a laptop defect!!! So yes, I was considering going back to XP, especially as I now have an external modem. The reason for posing my question was to see if anyone with more experience could advise me. So thanks all. Maybe I'll try XP first as it is the quickest option. Unfortunately, Asus don't allow their provincial dealers to even open up the laptop to add more RAM so it would have to be sent to Bangers, and I'm in Songkhla for the next few months.

[cdnvic]

Bypass the dealer and go to an independant shop that will add the RAM in five minutes. You don't need RAM from Asus, or to have them install it, it just has to be the same spec as what's inside. This doesn't have to be a complicated operation involving shipping.

[Riley'sLife]

Wouldn't opening it up cause problems with the Asus warranty?

[youngkiwi]

Although 1GB is the recommended minimum for Vista, it runs nicely on 1GB for general purposes. Additional RAM is not required unless you intend to do heavy multitasking, encoding, gaming or graphic work. Adding additional RAM is certainly better, but you won't take full advantage of it unless you perform the above type of tasks. My Dell laptop of similar specs has 2GB and the machine barely utilises more than 1-1.2GB, unless enhanced workloads are performed.

[Riley'sLife]

It seems that extra RAM wouldn't hurt then, as I do hope to use the laptop for gaming. I'll call Asus first as I don't want to compromise the warranty. As it stands, I have to say that I am less than impressed with the performance, so I gotta do something. I only paid 39,000Thb for it so maybe I'm being too critical. Thanks guys..appreciate the advice.

Cheers Rick

[cdnvic]

I've never owned a machine who's warrantee would be compromised by adding RAM, especially if a qualified technician did it. I'm sure they'd prefer you buy it from them though, but they'll just install exactly what the others would.

[youngkiwi]

As you've got 1GB now, you've probably got two 512MB modules. In this case, you can either remove one of the modules and insert a 1GB module, giving you a total of 1.5GB, or swap both 512MB modules out for 1GB ones, giving you 2GB. It shouldn't void the warranty as RAM is designed to be user servicable. Worst case is if you swapped out both modules, they wouldn't honour any warranty claims relating to the RAM. Best to check with ASUS of course for the official story.

[Riley'sLife]

OK, thanks cdnvic for that. I bought Asus because of its reputation and 2yr International warranty I really need to contact Asus about that. Other manufacturers like Acer, HP etc seem ok with dealers giving warranty service, but Asustek specifically told me that during the life of the warranty the only way the warranty is kept in place is for it to be sent to Asustek in Bangkok. I don't know if adding RAM is something they will allow "anyone" to do. You may well be correct. Either way thanks for your help, appreciate it.

[stumonster]

read the article below ( note the turn off eyecandy section )

Soup Up Your System

Has your laptop's performance ground to a halt? Follow these ten steps and give your system a kick in the you-know-what.

by John Delaney

09/07/2007

http://www.laptopmag.com/Features/Soup-Up-Your-System.htm

[jmac]

Have xp installed in addition to vista and make it dual boot and see if it improves things. No need to remove vista. You can install xp yourself but may need help to do the dual boot thing if you are not knowledgeable.

[onethailand]

cdnvic is correct, adding RAM to a notebook will not void the warranty. There is a special compartment for this purpose. Anything else, however, will probably mean opening the case - and that will void the warranty.

As for two 512MB modules, it's actually more likely that he'll find one 1024MB module. The days of requiring paired RAM modules for both notebook and desktop are (or should be) long gone.

Vista will work fine on 1GB but don't expect any speed. Once the machine has booted, Vista will reclaim the remainder for caching, so once you try to start more than a couple programs your machine will slow dramatically.

Brit - which USB stick are you using for the ReadyBoost? None of mine have worked so far but I also admit to not having searched for 4GB USB 2 sticks...

[cdnvic]

For a device to be compatible and useful it must conform to the following requirements:

* The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)

* Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for ReadyBoost

* The device should have an access time of 1ms or less

* The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device

* The device must have at least 235 MB of free space

* NTFS and FAT32 are supported

* The initial release of ReadyBoost supports one device

* The recommended amount of memory to use for Windows ReadyBoost acceleration is one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) installed in your computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_boost

[nikster]

Vista is a step back from Windows XP, but if your laptop is designed for it then it would most likely be more trouble to downgrade to XP than to deal with Vista's shortcomings.

I don't know what makes Vista fast or slow - what I do know is that it's slow as a dog on my Dual Core 2GHz laptop with 2GB RAM. It has enough RAM, the CPU is fast enough, dedicated graphics, a normal 5400 RPM 160GB hard drive. Windows experience index is 4.5, with all values at 5 except hard disk. Yet Vista is super slow. I think that's a bug in Vista. It's the only explanation because this was a fresh clean install of Ultimate. Could be that it doesn't like being installed on the D:\ drive with dual boot. Or some incompatibility with the BIOS makes it slow. Or some driver. Whatever it is, fact is that it's ###### slow and nothing helps. ReadyBoost doesn't help either BTW, I see no difference with a compatible 4GB USB stick.

Many others report performance to be just fine or even really good. Further indication that it runs differently on different machines.

For the Asus, I'd try to upgrade the BIOS and all drivers you can find. Usually on the manufacturer's home page.

Edited September 22, 2007 by nikster

[gnisten]

quote

The HD on the new laptop was partitioned into three by the dealer, and many programs were installed for free on two of the drives

unquote

There is one problem with this; some dealers (or their programs) disable DMA on HDD.

After that you will only have PIO-mode which is very slow.

To check, open a "Device Manager", find IDE/ATAPI controller, Primary (secondary) channel,

uncheck "PIO-mode" if checked. Then you have to enable DMA, probably UDMA-5.

You can do this with secondary (DVD) also.

regards

Edited September 22, 2007 by gnisten

[Riley'sLife]

The first new Asus laptop I had (3weeks ago) was the same spec as the one I have now, except that its O.S. was XP. At that time my main concern was that the internal modem wouldn't work with my TOT landline. However, I wasn't particularly impressed with it's speed using XP, and was very disappointed that it was hardly different to my 8 year old laptop, which ran both W98 and XP. Seems I wrongly assumed that using Vista Ultimate would somehow "transform" my experience into a modern speedy one.

I can hardly believe that I should need to upgrade to a 2gigRAM, buy an external modem, maybe play around with BIOS, O.S. and drivers and generally experiment with my new laptop to bring it up to the performance of my old 8year old one!!!!!! Kinda defeats the purpse of buying a new laptop in the first place.

Asus sell their laptops, 50% of which have 512RAM as standard, promoting Vista. (Well, actually in their August brochure they were promoting "Windows Home Visit Basic" - now that's a fruedian slip if ever! - I could just do with a Home Visit Basic from one of Asus' top management right now. )

Maybe I'm being too harsh; maybe it's an O.S. problem. I'm not experienced enough to play with BIOS and drivers, etc., so I'm gonna instal XP too and see if that makes a difference, if not then it's a RAM double up, if that doesn't work then it's time for an "Angry Farang Asus Laptop through their Window Factory Visit Basic ". Sorry to hear your Vista experience is as slow as mine nikster, even with your 2 gig RAM. Thanks for the input everyone.

Edited September 22, 2007 by Riley'sLife

[Riley'sLife]

Under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers in Device Manager are listed ATA Channel 0, ATA Channel 0, ATA Channel1, ATA Channel 2. The first two mentioned have "enable DMA" checked. The other two don't show the enable DMA box. None have any reference to PIO-mode. I don't really understand any of this gnisten I gotta tell you.

I have just checked out the system performance and it shows a Base Score of 3.0. Subscores are Processor 4.9 RAM 4.5 Graphics 3.0 Gaming Graphics 4.0 Primary hard disk 4.7

[cdnvic]

Vista is a step back from Windows XP

Oh hardly

[george]

Vista is not a step back, rather opposite. Upgrade your RAM to 2MB then its wonderful.

[ballbreaker]

You said the dealer installed lots of free programs. Take a look at number of running processes you have because that might be the slow down.

[Firefoxx]

OEM installed OS's tend to have a lot of bloatware, which can slow down the startup process, you should check that.

As to the matter of installing new RAM and voiding the warranty, it depends on the manufacturer/model. Sometimes they allow a user to do it, sometimes they require you to bring it to a service center to not void the warranty. It's not always easy. My friend had a Sony 17" notebook (or rather laptop) that he wanted to add ram to. We had to nearly take it completely apart to access the ram slots... the only thing we didn't disassemble was the LCD. It was definitely not meant to be user serviceable.

There might also be a driver/program conflict which is affecting the performance. You might try updating all the drivers, or do a clean install of Vista.