Does resolution effect the M4400's performance.

When I first received my M4400, it was pretty choppy and sluggish, even on the desktop for things like opening start, and clicking on the dropdown menus! But when I went into the Nvidia control panel and changed the resolution from 1900x1200 to 1200x800, it started performing smoothly.

I've never heard about resolution effecting a laptop's basic performance this much, especially one built to handle this resolution. Perhaps there's a hidden variable... Is Ultimate slower than Home by any means? Or could you point out to me what drivers or updates I should be downloading?

If it's not any of these, then what could it be?

 

Try turning Vista's Aero effects off

 

Aero shouldn't be doing any of this. Try installing (reinstalling) the graphics drivers.

 

I can remember that when using Vista, a higher resolution means more memory usage by the process "dwm" (Desktop Window Manager), and the more windows you have opened, the higher the memory usage will be. But that doesn't actually explain such a slowdown with 4GB of RAM. There is another thing called "GDI Concurrency", which could be the cause. Please read http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx.

While I haven't seen any such benchmarks, I highly doubt that there is any difference in speed. At least there's definitely not a noticeable one that has been built in on purpose.

I don't know if this problem could even have to do with that, but it can't hurt to measure you DPC Latency using the "Thesycon DPC Latency Checker" in case you haven't already done that. There's a thread about it, have you checked it out yet? Dell Latitude DPC Latency Issues thread.

You can also try installing the A06 graphics driver. It's not the latest one, but it seems to be the "smoothest" in certain conditions. Looks like that's true because it doesn't always render the picture perfectly (behaving more like a gaming driver, and less like a fussy driver for professionals).

 

Your laptop is more than capable of supporting 1900x1200 resolution in Windows Vista, with Aero on. I would follow run a quick benchmark of your graphics card and see if it's performing up to par. If not, follow Greg's advice and reinstall the graphics drivers.

 

I have the same config and it's never been sluggish, only time the resolution affects performance is when playing game at native res...but it still does that fine too

 

just turn off the nvidia powermizer

 

dun dun dun solved! thanks for the input.

 

Stupid question:

I installed laptopvideo2go's 179.62 version and can't seem to find some settings in the nividia control panel.

Powermizer is missing as well as advanced color settings gamma-curve.

Do i need to install the desktop version for that purpose?

 

I have powermizer set to use medium speed settings on my Gentoo box (yeah, waste of FX1700M, oh well), and have no issues. Using 180.48 nvidia binary blob driver.

Maybe it's a windows thing?