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David Overton's Blog » Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow
Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow

I was browsing the UKSBSG Yahoo Group (a group for UK Small Business Partners) when I noticed Alistair's post in response to slow Vista systems and I thought I had to share:

Hi,

Just from experience, I had similar issues on Outlook 2007 and, to a
lesser extent, Vista in general - especially on boot, which would
take an age. I am using a Dell Dimension 9100, 2GB ram and SATA
drives. One would think it would be pretty good, but behaved like a
dog.

The Microsoft fix made some little difference. What made a huge
difference though was updating the SATA drivers on my Dell box. These
were not listed under updates and I had to search for them, but it is
chalk and cheese now.

Persevere, once you have it right it's a dream: I have to say I love
Vista, it is stable, runs all our legacy apps, line of business
accounting apps, remote jobs and managed to blow away our desktop
uptime record - still stable at 60 days uptime. XP struggled at 30.
I do strongly suspect that naff drivers are a major factor in the bad
press that Vista has been receiving; I suspect it's been too easy to
get them through the certification procedure.

Anyway, just my two pennoth.

 

Alistair

 

that was it except to say that besides the Updates technology in Vista you should also go and check the OEM provider for your systems and graphics cards to get more from Vista.

thanks

David

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Posted Thu, Jun 28 2007 4:43 PM by David Overton
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Comments

Tim Long wrote re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow
on Thu, Jun 28 2007 5:47 PM

My experience bears this out. I recently supplied new Office Ready PCs to a customer. My system builder supplied Vista and Office pre-loaded. But the PCs were slower than I expected. The Vista Performance Rating was reported as 1.0, which is amazingly poor for brand new Core2 Duo machines. After a bit of digging around for updated drivers and flashing the BIOS, I got the rating up to 5.2 - what a difference!

The Wow only starts after you get the drivers right!

Jeremy Norton wrote re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow
on Fri, Jun 29 2007 5:17 PM

I feel some of the bad rep Vista has been receiving is undeserved. A lot of it has to do with immature 3rd party drivers and software. Some more of it is due to users trying to run Vista on dog-slow hardware and then complaining about the poor speed.

We have Vista business at my workplace, and although my familiarity with it is nowhere close to XP, it has been exceptionally stable over the past 2 months. With decently powerful hardware, vista runs very well.

That said, not everything about Vista is great. Some of the changes drive me up the wall. A good example is the Vista disk defragmenter- so dumbed down that it is ridiculous! Our IT guys have put Diskeeper Pro on all the desktops and it works great. No more having to guess what the defragger is doing, and no more slow-as-molasses defragging. Diskeeper runs fast, and tell me exactly what it is doing. Excellent number of options too...something the vista defragger simply lacks.

David Overton wrote re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow
on Fri, Jun 29 2007 5:27 PM

Jeremy,

I agree with you wholeheartedly on all accounts.  I think the changes to Backup are good, but power users need more options.  I think the changes to defrag are probably not final and I would expect to see changes in a future product to more meet your requirement (although millions of home users are now happier).  Having said that - not everything on your PC should come in the OS or from MS.  Diskkeeper is an excellent product.

Thanks for the positive things said about Vista though.

ttfn

David

John Currie wrote re: Alistair likes Vista and found out that the Dell SATA drivers were making is go slow
on Wed, Jul 4 2007 3:11 PM

Alistair is my line mananger here at GWA.

This issue affected three machines here which were all running Intel Sata chipsets using a hardware raid container.

Vista was absolutely awful until we discovered this.

To give more of an insight into it we used the new vista built in tools to track the issue down, the new "Performance Information & Tools" section in control panel was a massive help and I think its a massive leap forward in monitoring from XP.

After downloading the latest intel sata drivers, boot times went from 20-30 mins to 2-3 mins and the general speed within Vista after boot was remarkably improved.  That kind of boot time was making the whole experience a bit naff until we fixed it, now I'm happy.

It's worth noting that we was checking the Dell site for updates for the 9100 and still to date no sata drivers have been released.  The intel site provided the drivers after using the chipset id utility.

Cheers,

John

David Overton's Blog wrote Is Vista really that bad or do we have rose tinted glasses - How well was Windows XP accepted in the early years
on Thu, Nov 29 2007 9:16 AM

I have had a bit of a rant with Vlad over at Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 Performance Stats: Flawed Samples or

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