May 6th, 2008

Fixing Windows Vista, Part 3: Top Troubleshooting Tools

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:19 pm

Categories: Tips, Windows Vista

Tags: Performance, PC, Driver, Microsoft Windows Vista, CPU, Tool, Dialog Box, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Performance Management, Microsoft Windows

Do you think Windows Vista is slow, crash-prone, or unreliable? Join the crowd.

Over the past year, reviews of Windows Vista by mainstream media outlets, the technical press, bloggers, and ordinary users have been, for the most part, scathing. And many of those bad reviews were absolutely accurate. My co-authors and I just completed an extensive post-Service Pack 1 revision of our book Windows Vista Inside Out. Over the past year, we installed, upgraded, and used Windows Vista on a broad cross-section of hardware designs from nearly a dozen manufacturers. During that time, we experienced some of those same performance, reliability, and compatibility issues ourselves. What we found was simple: With a clean install on well-supported hardware, everything worked just fine. But toss in an incompatible application or a flaky video, storage, or network driver, and performance could suffer. Badly.

Over the past year or so, we have also observed steady and occasionally dramatic improvements in the Windows ecosystem. Most of the large issues in Windows Vista were effectively resolved by a series of updates delivered via Windows Update, including more than 500 fixes that were rolled up into Service Pack 1. Third-party hardware makers, many of whom were slow to get working Vista drivers out the door, have since released updates that can make a huge difference in the Vista experience.

Today’s conventional wisdom, based on more than a year’s worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same.

In 2008, there is no excuse for a PC maker to ship a Vista-based system that is anything less than fast and reliable. Sadly, many of them still do a terrible job, loading new PCs (especially notebooks) with outdated drivers, crapware, and overbearing security software that can result in a terrible Vista experience.

If you unbox a new PC and it performs like a slug, you’re likely to just live with the frustration (and maybe even blog about it), because everyone knows that Vista sucks. Right?

Wrong.

I believe you have every right to expect excellent performance from Windows Vista, and I’m going to back that conclusion in today’s post, the latest in my Fixing Vista series, with details on how to use Vista’s built-in tools to find and fix the problems that stand between you and an excellent Vista experience. Specifically, I believe all of the following statements should be true:

• On a new PC built with up-to-date hardware, Windows Vista should start up in a minute or less and shut down in 30 seconds or less.
• Video performance and audio playback should be smooth and glitch-free.
• Programs should open quickly and do their work without affecting your ability to perform other tasks.
• File transfer speeds should be limited only by the capabilities of your hardware (disk, controller, and network).
• System crashes should be nonexistent, and application crashes should hang the faulting program only, without affecting other programs.

If any of those conditions fail, you have a PC that needs fixing. Despite what you might read from self-proclaimed experts, there is no secret formula, magic bullet, or special MakeRocketShipGoFast registry hack that will suddenly send your system zooming into warp speed, nor do you need third-party diagnostic or repair software. Instead, the formula for getting excellent performance out of a Windows Vista PC is much more prosaic: start with quality components, make sure every piece of hardware has the right drivers and every piece of software is up to date, and fix any performance bottlenecks.

In this post and its accompanying image gallery, I’ll introduce you to four built-in tools you can use to track down and fix performance problems.

Page 2: Let Windows identify performance issues

Page 3: Gather hidden system details

Page 4: Get the most out of Task Manager

Page 5: Learn to use Vista’s amazing real-time performance sleuth

Next –>

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