My friend is running Vista Home Basic. Apparently it was working well until I touched the machine and optimized Vista, disabling services that she didn't need and turning off the eye candy that would slow the machine down. (It's a Dell Inspiron 1501, by the way.) Now when she runs World of Warcraft in her usual windowed mode, it exhibits very choppy frame rates... as in that it pauses/becomes unresponsive every second. However, when she maximizes the windowed mode it runs perfectly fine. I have not tried to run it in fullscreen mode and she won't want to anyway because she uses the windowed mode to be able to use AOL. Also, occasionally during the maximized windowed mode and always during the resized window mode, AOL and Firefox CRAWL and have the stuttering, sluggish performance problem. What's weird is that this only happens some of the time when World of Warcraft is in its maximized window mode, so the problem is inconsistent, leaving me scratching my head.
So far to rectify what was done, I set all services back to their default settings and undid all of my changes, but the problem still exists. I installed updated Catalyst drivers (as this computer houses an ATI Xpress 1150 integrated graphics card), which she didn't have installed at the time when it was working fine (before I touched the machine). I've Google'd to see if anyone has the same problem and a lot of people report the problem, but most forums end up with posters blaming Vista and whatnot instead of solving the problem. As much as I hate Vista, I'm stuck with having to deal with it because my friend is as stubborn as they come when it comes to her computer. She definitely will be wanting to keep AOL and World of Warcraft under Vista since she hates XP. (Please don't tell me to just reinstall XP or get rid of Vista or whatever, since it's not a solution I can convince her to do. This is a woman that refuses to use Firefox because she's so accustomed to AOL.)
Anyone have any clues? I'm stuck.
Windows never makes sense to me... 
