Computer/Vista Help Plz
 

A little while back, I came across a setting in Windows Vista that let me increase my computers performance (Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options). It was set on "Energy Star" so I changed it to "High Performance". Everything on my computer went from fancy looking to generic looking and dull.

But, it turns out that my computers performance is much much much worse on the High Performance setting. I couldn't hardly do anything with Maya, in fact 10,000 polygons would crash Maya. I have it back on Energy Star and I can now open up all my Maya projects again. So, I'm happy about that now, but...I now want to create some tutorials but I can't run Maya 2009 and Camtasia Studio 6.0 at the same time. Maya keeps freezing up. At first there were some hot key issues, but I set all the hot keys in Camtasia (both main screen and recorder) to Shift/Alt/Ctrl. But it still seems like my computer can't handle both at the same time.

Is there a way that I can boost the performance of my computer. I'm guessing there is since it's on Energy Star right now, but I don't know how. Apparently the High Performance Setting isn't doing what it's supposed to do:(

EDIT: Ok, I played around with setting some more. The problem isn't the settings I mentioned above. It's the Visual Effects setting. If I set it to best appearance, then all is good, but if I set it to best performance, then I get the generic looking screens and performance is WAY BAD, hows that for irony. Anyway, I guess high performance means non graphical stuff maybe. Sounds like I need to invest in a better computer.

That's Vista for ya. I had a similar issue when I disabled all the bells and whistles in the Vista GUI, performance went to crap in some programs, I just read this to my boyfriend and we both agree that it could be a lot of things (personally I think Maya is being underpowered hence the crashing). Don't know your configuration, is it off the shelf or built from scratch. Go in and instead of using those power and gui presets, manually change/disable them so you know EXACTLY whats being changed. Tweak your startup options, there's probably a lot of crap running that you don't need.

GREAT advice GecT, thanks a whole heap! I'll try that out now.

YES, YES, YES! I'm not a computer technical person but I found the startup files, and I also found some other settings that I tweaked. My computers perfomance has jump up significantly just by changing a few things. I disabled some startup programs, went into the advance settings for my computers performance and set them manually like you said. I also found an NVidia control panel and maxed out the performance on it as well.

I did some tests and so far all is REALLY, REALLY GOOD! I pulled up some of my heavier maya scenes that give me alot of trouble just by rotating in shaded mode. Now they rotate really smooth and effortlessly. And Maya and Camtasia run smoothly together too.

THANK YOU!

No problemo, just gotta tweak some things, run disk defrag and cleanup periodically and all should be ok. Have fun and stuff :p

It worked really great, but I do need a better computer I think. When I get into the texture editor, my computer boggs down while camtasia is running. So, even though its much better than it originally was, it's still not powerful enough to perform the way I need it to. I'm going to spend a few days tweaking and such but if I can get it up to what I need, I'm going to start investing in a better computer.

When you say that you disabled some startup programs, did you mean services?

Windows has a lot of services running or loaded into the memory that are not required by most people. Disabling them can free up a bit of memory.

I looked into what you said Architect and I was startup programs that I disabled, not services. I found the services section but I don't know what most of those are. I'll try googling them later to see if I can figure out what each service is. At this point I'm a little hesitant to turn any of them off.

Perfecto, when you're recording the tuts is Maya maximized on high res? If that's so then the vid will be captured at a lame rate :/

What do you mean as in "full screen"? If so, yes, i have it maximized. I can't imagine doing it with a smaller screen, but the recordings are not effected as long as the ouput settings are set up correctly.

Edit: If there is a quality setting inside Maya, I'm not aware of it, where do I look?

Yeah that's what I meant. I'd tweak the recording settings but I still had some issues, they went away when I resized the Maya window :x

Yeah, one has to be careful when tweaking services - disabling the wrong ones can result in very bad things happening.

I did a very quick search on Google and found this site which looks like a good place to start (but it isn't official): http://www.speedyvista.com/services.php