I saw my first BSOD in years on my week-old Vista laptop. Coming out of sleep mode: Ta-daaaaaaaaaa. The only software I had installed at that point was Office 2007.

I'm trying to figure out why my laptop is so slow booting up. It takes a good 3-4 minutes until it establishes network connectivity. About 60-90 seconds coming out of sleep or hibernate. My 4 year old XP laptop is about 60 seconds boot up and 15 seconds out of sleep. And coming out of sleep mode, every 6-7th time my Vista won't find the network at all so I have to reboot.

Maybe I have to try PTravel's suggestion and shut off Vista's special effects. But since I purposely got 3Gb Ram to avoid that issue, I'm not thrilled with the OS as of yet.

It all depends on your graphics card. The better your graphics card, the less impact system effects will have on system performance.

So if you have a good graphics card, disabling visual effects won't provide a noticable increase in performance because the visual effects weren't impacting performance to begin with.

But if you don't have a good graphics card, then fiddling with visual effects can improve performance.

See my previous post. Your graphics cards is the critical factor here, not RAM. If you have a poor graphics subsystem and try to use all of Vista's visual effects, then whether you 1, 2, or 3gb of ram won't make a difference. You need a better graphics card.

But if I'm not doing anything graphics intensive - ie. coming out of sleep mode and just waiting for the nic to become active, what would a better graphics card do? My issue is with the boot up/wake up speed.

Check the settings on the NIC to see if the option to "allow windows to shut down this device to save power" is set. That has been a source of much malcontent for me in getting Vista online faster. And it doesn't save that much power.

Coming out of sleep it is also going to be slower since it has to refresh 3GB of RAM rather than whatever the older machine has.

Finally, what is the speed of your HD in RPMs? A 4200 or 5400 RPM drive will noticeably slow things down compared to a 7200 RPM drive.

I've changed the power setting on the NIC. I'll see if that improves things at all. Thanks!

The HD is 5400RPMs. Couldn't see going for the 7200 based on what I do/cost and the simple fact I didn't need the size drives on the laptop that the 7200's come in. Maybe I was wrong.:D

My bad. You said "Maybe I have to try PTravel's suggestion and shut off Vista's special effects. But since I purposely got 3Mg Ram to avoid that issue". It sounded to me like you were saying that you purposely got 3gb of RAM to avoid having issues with special (graphic) effects. Guess I misread your statement.

This has made a HUGE difference. Thank you!:cool:

Sorry, it was probably my frustration causing the misunderstanding. I know Vista shouldn't be 'that bad' and was just grasping at any suggestion to speed this thing up. Having something new is supposed to be fun.:D

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I have it on a new laptop. Like you wasn't sure. But I actualy like it and it works great with a high end lapply anyway

Vista is to hard on hardware resources. The jump from a fast XP PC to a fast Vista PC that can use all the cool graphic gadgets is a big jump right now. Over the next year with dropping prices for hardware it won't be such a problem.

Still I think MacOS X is the best.

I have the Mobile Intel 945 chipset. I don't think this is one of the better graphics cards. I don't even think it is a card, it's probanly integrated on the motherboard. I didn't need a high end graphics card on this notebook.

I can't say I agree on any point. With a good PC Vista is terrific. The laptop I bought that runs Vista cost me essentially the same as its XP-based predecessor that it replaced. With the release of SP1, there's really no reason to hold off getting a Vista machine. Of course, if you don't need a new computer now, it probably makes sense to wait a couple of years until Win 7 comes out.

Vista is like nearly all MS software in that it has many features that are not very well documented. I think Microsoft likes to feed all the "tips/tricks/hidden secrets" bookwriters. There are many examples of simple adjustments you can make to the "stock" setup of Vista to get it to run VERY fast, if that's what you want. Like others said, UAC is a complaint. Microsoft kind of tried (maybe too hard) to make Vista idiot-proof and this had the side effect of frustrating many other users. Vendors did not write drivers in time for Vista, either. This, I believe was due to Microsoft promising that software so many times before and not delivering that when they actually did deliver, nobody was ready. I have 2 Vista machines and have never once had a BSOD. Most "explorer" lockups were due to 3rd party drivers (in fact, all were). Mostly video, but also some due to Adobe Reader and Flash.
Vista has easier wireless networking, at least for me. That was supposed to be a feature, and it seems to be a big improvement over XP. I stil get frustrated copying big files to something like a thumb drive, but have learned one reason Vista seems slow is that it (by default) verifies all the data it copies, making the process seem much longer than it really is. XP did not verify. I guess you can turn off verification, but once I learned what it was doing, I am OK with it.
Vista got bad press from a few reporters in the very beginning, and has not yet lived that down. It is an excellent operating system, and will be widely adopted in business over the next couple years. A couple reasons it has not been thus far are 1. it needs generally new hardware and 2. there was concern over driver and software compatibility (largely unwarranted at this point). Vista runs fine (great, even) but does need a pretty good processor and A LOT of ram. My HP laptop with 2gb ram, AMD processor (dual core) and cheapo onboard graphics runs kind of slow using Vista Aero (hey, I like it and live with the speed penalty). My HP destop with 4gb ram runs very, very fast. It has a cheap but dedicated nVidia card and that makes a huge difference in Aero.