Worried about low score on Vista

[gosainters]

I recently installed Vista OS on my Toshiba Portege M400. The specs are 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 80 GB HDD, Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express.

I am disappointed with many of the scores (i expected a poor graphics score - so that's fine). Do you agree that they are low? What could be causing this? Would reformatting o a clean install of vista help?

Summaries:

CPU mark 433
2dGraphics mark 73.8
Memory mark 113.1
Disk mark 132.6
CD mark 274
#D Graphics mark 53
Pass mark rating 205.3

CPU:
Integer Math 62.1
Floaing Math point 192
Find Prie numbers 202.7
S SE/3DNow! 1685
CPU Compression 1621
CPU Encryption 10.3
CPU string sorting 756

Memory:

Allocate small block 223
Read cached 496
Uncached 442
Write 282
Large RAM 85.6

Disk:

Sequntial read 17.5
Sequential write 15.2
Random seek + RW 4

-Gosainters

[David (PassMark)]

Laptop computers are always slower than deskops. So you can't expect miracles. But none the less the results appear low across the board.

For example for the Core 2 T5600 CPU I would have expected a CPU mark result of ~900. I assume you have a T5600?

Disk speed of only 17MB/sec is also low.

Without having the PC in front of us it is hard to comment on why it is slow. If could be simply that Vista is running tasks in the background (like the search indexing function).

[gosainters]

Thanks for the post - really appreciate it.

It's a T2400. (this is what's in the Toshiba advertising about the machine:
Intel® CoreTM Duo Processor T2400
(1.83GHz, 667MHz FSB, 2Mb L2 cache)

How do I find out what vista's running in the background (and turn whatever I find off if I don't need it)?

[David (PassMark)]

Two simple things. Start windows task manager and see what tasks are running and using CPU time. Check your hard disk light, is it flashing constantly with activity?

[gosainters]

When click on the task manager 'performance' tab it shows that cpu usage is hovering between 92 and 97% with the only applicaions open being IE7 and task manager.

When I click the 'processes 'tab, I have 89 processes listed. In the CPU column most are at '00', but WINORD.EXE is consistently around 40 about 5 others vary between 01 and 06)

My hard disk light is constantly flashing, as is the light on my Lexar Flash rive that I am using for readyboost.

What d you recommend I do?

[gosainters]

After posting, I noticed that Windows Live OneCare was doing a tune up. When I switched this off,CPU usage went down to 50-65%. But the hard disk light and flashdrive light were still consistently flickering.

[David (PassMark)]

I assume you mean winword.exe and not WINORD.EXE?

Winword.exe is normally the Microsoft Word process. But there are also some viruses with the same name.

If you don't have Microsoft Word open, but you still see winword.exe in the task list, then this is cause for some concern if you ask me.

What is for sure however, is that you are never going to get good benckmark scores with something eating up 40% of your CPU time.

[gosainters]

I ended the WINWORD.EXE process in Task Manager, Now CPU usage with only two applications open (task manager and IE7) hovers around 10-20%.
I ran all tests again and received a total score of 248. How does that sound for my computer?

[David (PassMark)]

So that is a 20% improvement over your initial score. But 10% - 20% Idle CPU usage is still high. I think you should be able to do a bit better.

You could also try deleting any junk on your hard disk and then defagging it.

[gosainters]

Tried both. I am now getting results around 270. I noticed that when I look up computer info after testing it says that total physical memory is 2038 MB RAM but available physical memory is just 997 MB RAM. All the free baselines on passmark show that my computer is underperforming on this variable too. Do you have any ideas about remedies?

[David (PassMark)]

It is normal not to have much free RAM on Vista. I only have 39MB of free RAM on my 2GB Vista machine. The rest is used for caching. Which is normal.

It is wasn't a portable PC I would suggest getting a new graphics card.