Quite dissappointed

[fish7137]

Hi people with superior knowledge, I have 2 queries....

Ok so ive just bought the Vaio K215B. Knowing it is not a gaming machine, I wasnt suprised by the low frame rates and jerkey play in games. However, there is something which I am really dissappointed about - the speed.

My previous PC had a Athlon 2000XP processor and 512mb ram. My new Vaio has an Intel Celeron 2.8Ghz and also 512mb ram. Therefore you may understand my shock at the fact that the laptop is about 4 times slower than my PC! It cannot handle multi-tasking and high powered programs take forever to load when they were instant on my desktop pc.

So my question is this.....

Is there any settings either in BIOS or Windows which I can change to bring the computer speed up to what I expect it should be.

Second problem is this.....

There is about 7Gb of my lowly 40Gb HDD dedicated to system restore. I really dont want the restore function as all drivers are available on the net, the software is pants and I have my own windows cd. Therefore my second query is this....

Is it possible to free up the system restore partition to use as a storage drive WITHOUT having to re-format my laptop.

If anyone can help me out on either of these issues, I will be eternally gratefull and hold you in the highest possible esteem.

(btw, sorry if im repeating any previous threads that may have been posted elsewhere.)

THANKS:smileygrin:

[TygerTyger]

Unfortunately you are enormously limited by the Celeron processor. Celerons are considerably less able then other Intel processors, certainly less so than an Athlon 2000, and sad to say there is little you can do around this.

[nemo66]

Hello! (and welcome...)

First i must tell ya.....it´s your fault by buyn´a system with an "CELERON" processor.(not meant bad...)
Second...Sony doesn´t allow much twiddling in the bios setup..so u can´t change much there.
U must look in the CP if there´s a option for gaming, if so than choose it and u may gain more performance.
Also u can try some third-party utilities for improving gaming performance....
Third: Sorry, but u must format the drive for using the whole space on it.
Just boot from a Windoes CD and reformat it within win-setup, but be sure to use NTFS.

Hope it helped a little...

[fish7137]

Ok thanks for the help.

Maybe I should have looked into processors a bit more before I bought the machine. Problem was, I was on a limited budget but really wanted a Sony so this is the only one I could afford.

Ah well, it does the job - even if the job is taking a lot longer than I want it to.

[TygerTyger]

It's a very fine computer you chose. It's just really not intended for games at all. The Celeron should work great business-machine wise.

[robpaxton]

A lot of the speed problems will be due to the hard disk. I believe the installed drive only spins at 4200RPM whereas most desktop drives are 5400 and 7200RPM.

If you are looking to increase the general speed and multitasking capability of your notebook then I would probably first look at a memory upgrade to 768Mb, checkout www.crucial.com/uk for prices of a 512MB memory stick. The only other reasonable upgrade would be to change to a hard drive with a faster spin speed but this will be relatively expensive compared to the memory upgrade..

[kee-lo_]

RAM is always worth getting.

[Woody27]

Ok thanks for the help.

Maybe I should have looked into processors a bit more before  I bought the machine. 

Hope fully my guide to recent the Intel processors (a few threads back) will help others make a more informed decision!

I agree with Kee-Lo, more RAM will speed up your computer the most as Celeron processors have no cache! Thus, eveything has to be written back and forth to the HDD, more memory will prevent this from happening as much!

CW

[Kei]

Huh. If you think that's slow, then compare it to my PCs.
I have a VAIO PCG-K215B (Celeron 2.8Ghz with 512MB DDR) just like you, and my desktop is a Mesh AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz with 256 MB DDR. And the Mesh desktop performs at least twice as fast as my VAIO.

[kee-lo_]

Heh thats not good!