Poor performance in Vista Ultimate 32bit

[verdegris]

Hello,

I'm running a one-day-old installation of Vista Ultimate 32bit and having a really bad experience with it.

My equipment is as follows:

Dell XPS 630i computer

Intel Core Duo E8400 3GHz processors

ATI Radeon HD 4800 series video cards-(4850 w/XP and 4870w/Vista)

3GB of RAM with XP, 4GB of RAM with Vista

I don't really understand these alterations in RAM and video card model-number. Can someone explain?

But the bottom line seems to be that demanding applications, especially Photoshop CS4, can hardly operate with this new OS. It's really very surprising.

Someone at the Adobe Forum claims that I should change to a 64bit system. Is it even possible to do that?

I haven't yet tried a 3d modeling app with Vista but I don't hold out much hope.

Why is Vista Ultimate giving me such poor performance? Shouldn't my computer be better able to handle it?

The people I talked to at Adobe enthusiastically recommend Vist in its 64bit form but I

don't know if it's possible for me to have that.

Can someone please advise me about how to become better informed about these issues?

Please help.

Thanks,

verdegris

[Raddy]

Its difficult to nail down exactly why you'd be experiencing poor system performance. I jumped straight from XP to Windows 7, but my friends told me that Vista was really bloated and consumed unnecessary amounts of system resources. I don't know why the video card model changed, but I know that 32-bit XP would give you funky numbers as you approached the 4GB limit because it reserved some of memory for the kernel, but maybe this was fixed in Vista.

As for 64-bit Vista, you can exchange your 32-bit license for a 64-bit license here for a small fee ($20 or so I think). The only thing that's really required is to have a 64-bit processor. You listed E8400 model, which is Core 2 Duo, but you say Core Duo. Core 2 Duo supports 64-bit, Core Duo does not. I'm going to guess that you have Core 2 Duo, but double check your processor model first. Beware, switching to 64-bit may require a fresh install.

I don't know that switching to 64-bit Vista will improve performance, but it's worth a shot. Hope this helps