I received an E521 yesterday with an X1300 Pro card and Vista basic on it. I have also been having general performance problems and had an issue where the screen would go completely blank upon booting to the login screen. Fortunately I was able to log in by blindly typing my password, and once Vista finished loading the display came back with a message along the lines of "The R300 driver stopped responding, but now it's recovered".

Updating the display driver seems to have fixed the black screen issue (I went to the ATI website and downloaded the latest driver from there - if you're running 32-bit Vista then http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/vista32/common-vista32.html is a direct link). Not sure if this is the same as the issue you've been having but it's worth a shot.

I haven't solved the performance issue yet though. The 'desktop manager' task seems to use quite a bit of CPU at times, and the hard drive seems to be busy with something (I haven't investigated what yet). I don't have any previous experience with Vista to compare with, but it looks like there is plenty of room for improvement on the basic installation I was delivered. Maybe someone else has some performance tips?

Hope that helps somewhat,
Dave.

Message Edited by miffeh on 04-05-2007 08:45 AM

I think the problem has been solved. I reinstalled Vista without all the drivers and other software that came installed from Dell (most of which are not the newest versions anyway). The system booted up fine at first but then the symptoms returned. I decided to turn of Windows Aero and rebooted and the symptoms disappeared. I have since left the Aero feature off and installed different programs and then rebooted each time and the symptoms seem to be gone. I think Aero is just too taxing on my system, even though I feel my system is adequate. I hope this will help any others who might be experiencing like problems.