Miraculously (and mysteriously), my internal wireless adaptor started working yesterday. Unfortunately, that gives me one less excuse to return the laptop.
I still have to figure out what to do about Linux. Also, I'm unimpressed with Vista so far. Last night, the machine crawled almost to a halt. It's a 2 GHz Turion with three gigs of RAM. It took forever for task manager to load, and it provided no information as to which process was causing the problem, but the CPU was saturated. I couldn't even shut down applications, or the computer itself. I eventually had to just power it down. It's been OK since I rebooted into safe mode, and then rebooted again, but I have no idea what was going on.
I realize it's fairly obvious, but do you have a realtime AV scanner going on? That can soak up a lot of CPU time. What about the display adapter? In my experience, your typical low-end integrated graphics suck from a performance standpoint, even with just basic Windows stuff.
You should've at least been able to see which process was hogging the CPU. If it appears to be none, there's a checkbox that lets you see processes from all users. Might be a service or something. You'll get an elevation prompt.
Some good info on speeding up Vista available here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2110596,00.asp
J.
There's a performance monitor somewhere that will tell you which processes are using what resources. No, it's not in Vista's task manager.
My new vista lap top pegged both cpus and the disk indexing to speed up disk searches that I never do. The indexing is supposed to run in background and shut down whenever the user wants to do something - clearly that failed.
After two days, I turned off the indexing and the system became merely sluggish instead of unusable.
Every new MS OS has been slower as far as users are concerned than the one before. However, most people get a new computer with a new OS and the new computer is enough faster to make up for the MS slowdown.
Vista took away more than Intel/AMD gave. My Vista lap top has two processors and they're each faster than the one in my old XP laptop and my new laptop has over twice as much ram as the old one. Yet, the old lap top is faster.
Yea, I've seen that more than once. That is why I usually just start dinking with the drivers. Whether it actually updates or changes anything is moot. It usually is just the act of going through and touch everything that nudges the runtime along.
BTW, I use Process Explorer to see what is going on in the background. Any version after 10.0 should be Vista compliant. It provides a really nice threaded view and quickly shows the underlying files associated with the process threads.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx