spacesurfer

Probably the best advice that hasn't been mentioned yet might be to reinstall everything from scratch. You'll have a fresh install that will be much faster. Good luck with activation.

I hope they devote some time to security issues as well. Man, if they made the best UI but forgot about security???

do your routine diagnostics - check your cables, update your firmware, try copying all contents of a DVD to HDD and see if it gives errors during the process...

You can instead try CCleaner. It's free and also has the ability to cleanup windows update uninstall files along with other crap. 1) As long as your system isn't suffering from any adverse effects of the windows updates, you are okay to delete those files. Be aware you can't uninstall them after you do. 2) Windows Cleanup utility, as far as I know, does actually uninstall the program and remove it from system according to my experience. I wouldn't recommend using it unless you know for sure you want to get rid of a certain program. Run the program and it will list the programs installed on your system. You can select which ones you want to remove permanently. It doesn't hurt to run the program.

That is correct. When you mix speeds, your faster RAM will run at the clock speed of the slower RAM. For normal tasks not involving gaming, you won't see a difference in removing the slower RAM according to an article I read at ExtremeTech. The more RAM the better (even if slower; however, I wouldn't a vast difference between the slower and the faster RAM) for non-gaming type of multitasking.

Oh Oh. Well, it seems to resume from sleep in XP but got problems in Vista. Back to the drawing board.

An Intel Pentium 4 is not exactly a dual core processor as we understand the new Core 2 Duo processor and the Quad processors. The Pentiums are based on the older chips and run hotter than the more efficient Core 2 Duos. I have a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz process on my older desktop and it runs slower than my Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz because you can't compare CPU speed between the two (not exactly apples to apples). Regardless, you probably may benefit from vLiting your Vista and get rid of the crap. I have Vista Ultimate on my Pentium Centrino laptop 1.7 GHz (IBM T42) with 768 MB DDR ram and it runs great!!! But it's been vLited to the essentials.

I am running Vista 64-bit Ultimate on a PC with specs a little lower than yours and 2 GB ram and it's not slow at all. I did remove a lot of crap using vLite on the copy I installed but most of it was crap like languages and manual install files and shouldn't affect the install size. Check your window experience performance score and see what component gives you the lowest score. Based on info you have given so far, I can think of two things that might increase your performance: 1) Instead of using the integrated graphics (which is probably eating some of your physical memory), buy a separate graphics card that has at least 256 mb memory (512 mb better), and 2) May want to increase physical but this is a catch 22 because 32-bit OS limits memory to 4 gb (of which only 3 gb will be available for apps). Okay, now if that doesn't increase performance, it could be that your HDD is failing or not giving you the performance you expect. Is is new? Old? Is is partitioned? If so, how much free space in the OS partition? Is it defragmented?

yup, it's alway been s3.

Well, it seems no one took a whack at this one, however, I think I solved my resuming from sleep problem with a BIOS update. Updating from F4 to F8 version on GA-P35-DS3L seems to have "fixed" two problems: 1) computer monitor coming back from sleep, and 2) a dull bland, long beep that occurs during power on (before the familiar system beep). However, when resuming from sleep, I still hear the dull, bland long beep. Strange...

How many times has this question been asked? Does anyone search before they post?

Yes, all hotfixes and security updates (for XP, IE, or WMP) create blue folders in the Windows folder and contain uninstall information. If you have determined that you will not be uninstalling these updates, then you can safely delete these folders to free up space. I would, however, get CCleaner. It has an option to remove hotfixes and let that program uninstall the updates.

I will do that when I get a chance.. (FYI, yes I was hoping that refreshing the score would enable Aero, but after a few of you posted it wouldn't, I still wanted to refresh it cause it's just a psychological thing - it's there and wants me to so I want to....)

I'm not saying updating the score will enable Aero. What I'm saying is because it's there, I have the urge to update it (b/c of the hardware change after installing the drivers.) And when I do, it crashes.

The drivers I tried were the ones I downloaded from Lenovo site. Will try Catalyst 8.1. I wouldn't want to enable Aero it the unofficial way. Whether it's not for Vista or not, it doesn't matter. Actually, Lenovo had drivers for Vista on their site, so, hummm??? Anyway, I've been able to get all the drivers to work except the modem, which I don't use. And with the magic of vLite, Vista is giving me great performance equal to that of XP that I was running. Well, if Radeon 7500 won't enable, oh well.... I'll learn to live without it. It's just that because the score is there, I just want to refresh the score so it gets updated....

I have an IBM ThinkPad T42 that has ATI Radeon Mobility 7500. I installed Vista 32-bit on it. Problem is after attempting to recalculate the experience score, it blue screens with the file ati3duag.dll file listed on the blue screen and the error is about non-paged fault or something like that. I'm trying to refresh the score so that, hopefully, Aero gets enabled. I can live with the basic theme right now but does anyone have any way of refreshing the score without making it crash?

Humm, after reading http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2328804,00.asp, I think there may be a difference, esp if I multi-task with Vega running. Except for gaming, the speed of the memory matters less for multi-tasking.

I think Windows 7 will be a much more refined and polished version of Vista, code clean up and performance improvements, that's all; but not revolutionary or evolutionary. Despite, if you skip on Vista, then definitely worth 7.

As Iceman said, it may be a limitation of XP sp0, which I believe was fixed in SP1. However, I wouldn't settle for less than sp2.

Winrar is a no-hassel install. If you've installed it or elsewhere, just copy the winrar folder in program files. It will run from anywhere as a portable app. thus, you can make an "Install" if you will, of this app simply by copying the files anywhere.

I should have checked here first: Vista-compatible Video Cards before I purchased a new one. I would have realized my old card was already supported. Anyway, my new card came and I've installed it already. The transparency seems to be a little better than the first card but it could be my imagination.

search for and download "microsoft base security analyzer". It's a free tool by MS that will tell you if there are any updates your system is missing. if you don't want to install that, then use belarc advisor. It also does the same but it's a smaller download. and it gives you a lot more info about your pc as well in a report format.

Drats!

Well, you Vista fanboys will love this! As I mentioned in my OP, I went to the scanner manufacturer website and couldn't find drivers from my old scanner that was originally made before vista arrival. However, when I ran windows update, it listed my scanner as an update. So I went to device manager and clicked on update driver and let it find drivers online and whadya know! My scanner works. All of my hardware works great! I'm surprised that I found 64-bit Vista drivers for a scanner built for XP ages ago.

Ummm, I guess you didn't read my post.... before you guys posted, I already added that I know it's because of Avast. My question is, is there a way without having to uninstall?? Of course, if no one knows of a way, then I will uninstall.