New owner, new member! How to speed up vista, what antivirus

Hello all! I just recently obtained a 751h-1279 with 2gb ram and a 250 gb hard drive. Unfortunately, the natively packed vista basic is slow as balls. I disabled some startup programs but I dont know what vista services to disable, and I havent been able to find a comprehensive list on the forums, though ive seen several references to it. Also, Im pretty sure that the preinstalled macaffee antivirus is a total resource-hog, but I dont want to be without AV. What program do you guys recommend? Ive heard that ESET NOD32 uses only 44mb of memory while running, and thats a good chunk under what macaffee does. Also, are there any other tips to increase boot time? And does using readyboost through the MMC reader add any performance?

In general, what should I do to get this thing up to par? I really dont want to have to return it, the screen is great! Id be willing to overclock it. Is tinyvista something worth looking into?

 

Hello,
You are doing the right things by reducing the startup and services to the minimum necessary. You might Google "Vista Speed up" for some more tips. Most people flush the installed AV and then either replace it with Avast! or Avira or just go without. Definitely drop the Google Desktop and/or the Microsoft equivalent. Don't know about Readyboost.

Flush all of the bloatware, it makes a noticeable difference in performance.

Find all of the latest driver updates, the drivers for this computer are not mature yet and significant improvements are being released every week.

Carefully read the thread here on setting up the video players, codecs and such and at least for the moment try to lower your expectations of Hulu and YouTube (i.e., Adobe FLASH) content until the Adobe 10.1 Flash release. If everything goes as hoped for, the FLASH world will change on that day.

A caution: Some of these units have a tendency to freeze up in use and for no obvious reason (there is a thread on this here and a long one at that) and if your system does exhibit this problem I would run, not walk, to the store from which it was purchased and exchange it post-haste. I cannot stress enough that notwithstanding the efforts of many owners as documented in the freeze up thread, no fix for this problem minus major hardware replacement has ever been totally successful. There are lots of units that work perfectly, so it isn't an everyone of them problem, but it isn't something you should have to deal with if you can exchange the unit.

 

Here's what you are looking for: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532

The most important thing you can do to drastically increase performance is to right-click "My Computer", hit "Properties", select "Advanced System Settings," then go to "Advanced" tab, Performance/settings button. Select the "Adjust for best performance" button.

Especially make sure the "smooth screen fonts" is NOT checked. This alone made an ENORMOUS difference in my 751s performance.

Also put it on Windows Classic Theme.

Finally, get an external mouse. I don't know why, but using an external mouse makes my 751 feel so much snappier & faster it isn't even funny. I got a really nice Microsoft mouse with one of the tiny "nano" receivers that you can just leave in the netbook all the time. It is very cool & convenient.

Good luck!

 

derangedgoose, what do you plan on doing with your 751 when sped up?

Vista really is an overbloated OS. XP and 7 work much better.

 

I would recommend the following from experience:

Dump Vista and grab Windows 7 while it's cheap - it's a million times less resource hugging once it's booted up. It does sometimes seem to take a little while to load up but once it has your 751 will be much happier. Plus you get the benefit that the GMA500 is slightly better supported after the latest W7 driver update.

Get a mini bluetooth mouse off eBay - they're only about £10 and work a treat (I have a non BT 751 but have a dual Wi-Fi/BT card installed).

Use AVAST antivirus (www.avast.com). Download the free home edition. I swapped to this about 4 years ago and have used it on every machine since then. Never got a virus, and it is not very resource hungry. You get a free licence renewed yearly and all updates and program updates for free.

My 751 is running aero, has all the preview screen running from the taskbar, and has no trouble with HD video, doesn't freeze, and happily runs Office 2007 version of PowerPoint with embedded flash videos with no problem at all...

The last thing to check is your RAM chip if you get any freezing - personally I went for a 667MHz Corsaire Value Ram 2gb stick, but I'm told Kingston are good too.

 

Keep this *one* visual effect turned on: "Use visual styles on windows and buttons"
It will keep Vista's menu bars from reverting back to the older, uglier, classic XP style. It makes the operating system look much better and won't cost you any performance worth noting. That's 90% of the looks and no real performance hit, since it doesn't use transparency or other costly effects.

Also, to play H.264 video files with the hardware-based decoder (i.e. to run High Def video from the hard drive), it's actually really easy under Vista. Ignore the complex guides out there, which are really aimed at XP.
1) Run PowerDVD 8 for the first time
2) Download and install Haali Media splitter:
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/MatroskaSplitter.exe
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/mkv/
3) Restart computer.

DONE! Just play H.264 based files in PowerDVD to get hardware acceleration.

 

thanks for all the help you guys! taking off mcaffee definitely helped a lot. I also found the vista service list at blackviper, and then I ran the vista boot re-organizer and defragmentation utility that was hosted over at nbr and it sped up boot time significantly! now all thats left is to overclock. can anyone point me in the direction of the right thread for overclocking the 751h? has anyone here done it? what clock speed can i reasonably expect to achieve?

 

Can you please give more info on this tweak; where you found the info?

You can find it here if you search (I'd help but don't know where exactly it is). I've skimmed a few threads on this topic and will tell you to definitely just be careful. You can damage your machine if you screw something up.

 

The boot defrag and optimizer can be found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2737834&highlight=gary#post2737834

You might have to register for the forums to see the post, I did.

The original post containing all the utilities and tips and tricks is referenced by drjones in "heres what you are looking for" in a post above. I highly recommend performing most of them and downloading their utilities that they reference, it helps a lot!

 

hi there.
this is my second day of using "Netbook Acer A751H-1279 Intel® AtomTM Z520 1.33GHz, 2GB, 250GB, Windows Vista Home Basic, Dark Blue", bought from Romania.
i had to buy it instead os an asus "Netbook Eee PC Asus EEEPC1005HA-BLK105X cu procesor Intel® Atom® N270 1.6GHz, 1GB, 160GB, Windows XP".
i took it because it had bigger hdd and twice ram.
as the starter of the thread, i want to make my vista run faster ! as much as i can.
i got out the macfee and installed avast (i was using it the past 2-3 years).
i disabled some start-up programs and the setting with "best performance" checked.
my problem now is this, maybe you have it too :
in youtube, full screen and hq the video streaming is very bad ... it's not fluently ...
also if i try to see a HD movie the quality is awfull... i use VLC as a video player....
how can i fix this ?
please forgive me for my bad english and for asking directly here, but i'm a newbie so please be nice

 

The easiest way to get the 751 running well for HD video is to dump Vista and go for Windows 7 because it has the newest drivers for the GMA500 graphics accelerator built in. You can watch HD video with normal Windows Media Player with no trouble. Even the You Tube vids work OK too.

 

1) For playing HD videos from your hard drive, please see my earlier post in this thread:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=18017&p=105813#p104662
You do NOT need to upgrade to Windows 7 (which is expensive) to watch WMV and H264 files from your computer. It's a simple process to enable in Windows Vista.

2) Youtube and other flash-based video sites will probably never run well on this computer. They use the CPU only, which is slow. It takes a lot of CPU power to decode streaming video. Sorry. You will have to live with it or get a computer with more processing power.

By the way, VLC player does not easily support hardware-based decoding. So it is a poor choice of video player on these slow Atom Processor based netbooks. This is unfortunate, as I really like VLC player.

 

thanks a lot for your fast replys.
first of all i don't want to move to windows 7very soon. i will tell you why : a have a vista license and i don't have the money to buy a new license for the near future. so i have to try to get the best from my acer, as much as it can.
i will try the solution mentioned in that post tracksmart.
and what .avi player do you recommend ?
so EVERY ONE that has this model has this problem ? it's not something i can do to make it better for youtube video streaming ?
thanks a lot again !!! this is a very useful forum for begginers !!!!!!!!

 

Glad to be of help.

Every computer with an Intel Atom processor has problems with streaming video (not just this computer). However, this computer is slightly worse than usual because the processor is slightly slower and the screen resolution is much higher. That's a double problem. Twice as many pixels to decode and a slower processor (1.3 GHz instead of 1.6 GHz).

That said, the hardware decoder in this computer will let you play some kinds of HD Video files from the hard drive that faster computers can't handle. Mostly WMV, MKV, and other files that are encoded using the H.264 format.

 

Put XP or 7 on it. Easy fix.

 

the thing is that i have a good license of vista that came pre-installed. i just don't want to waste money on another windows license, just for youtube full screen hq image quality
i am trying to make my vista as fast as i can.

i installed that codec and it seems that hd video playing is a little bit good.
but once again ... instead of vlc, what player should i use ?
powerdvd8 opens the .avi file but it has only sound, no image... only visualisation ..
wmp does the same thing ... only sound !

 

Hello again.

First, installing Windows XP or Windows 7 will not help with full screen youtube video. It's the processor that is the problem.

Second, AVI files are not supported by the hardware decoder. Try the playing these 720p files using PowerDVD. If hardware encoding is working, they should play smoothly: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

Third, there's no need to tell him to pay $120 for a new operating system. Windows 7 is nice, but it doesn't offer enough of a benefit to justify the current price on a $300 computer. If you are eligible for the $30 student edition, it's probably worth it, however.

 

thanks again for your support ...
yesterday i did a bad thing ... my wife has an Asus notebook. and because she was in a hurry, she didn't get the right AC adapter and my Acer netbook was plugged with an asus adaptar...
both 19 V output, but : acer was 1.98 (i think) ampers and asus adapter was 3.89 ampers .... fortunetly nothing bad happend

 

What would happen if I tried to install a copy of Win7 that has already been installed on one of my other computers? Yeah, I realize I should have bought the 3 computer version, but I screwed up and only ordered 2 copies at the preinstallation price of $50. And now I want to put Win7 on my 3rd computer.

 

Is paretologic spyware or is it actually anti-spyware? Also, is Avast safe or a scam? I came back from a week long vacation and found Paretologic on my desktop. Is it safe to just uninstall like any other program, or will it hide itself somewhere else in my computer - whether it is legitimate or not, I don't want it. I recently downloaded Avast and am curious of it's legitimacy as well. Thanks.
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