XP Service Packs Degrade Performance?

squibs

I recently did a clean XP install on a P4 2.6GHz machine running 512Mb RAM. The machine is about 4-5 years old and was very fast for the first two years with 256Mb of RAM - even running computationally intensive Pro-Audio software. Eventually, as happens, it ground to a halt and the extra 256 Mb of RAM didn't help much.

So I reformatted and reinstalled and defluffed the innards - the machine was running very quickly again, but as the service packs and updates came down over the next day or two the machine slowed pretty quickly. There are some extra services like AVG and Zone Alarm running, and whatever MS Office might have running in the background but not much else. I currently have 122Mb RAM free and the OS HDD is less than 1/3 full but booting another program will have the HDD crunching for several minutes.

So - can I credit the performance degradation to the XP updates? The machine used to be lots faster with more demanding apps and less RAM.

ethernet

Defrag that hard drive. You were right to reinstall.

Disable the crap that starts up at boot time: do Start --> Run --> msconfig. Click on Startup. Disable entries for Adobe Reader, RealPlayer or other junk you may have. If you're not sure about an entry, do a web search for it first.

To save a little RAM, use the Windows classic theme and disable the 'fancy' XP effects.

unnameduser

agreed. Also give ccleaner registry clean a go

A quick glance at task manager should indicate whether a system function or zone-alarm / AVG are the culprits.

squibs

My question was intended to be more general - is there a consensus out there that windows updates seriously degrade performance? I'm genuinely curious as to how a newly reinstalled machine got so slow so quick.

On the specifics of my case - I think the performance issues are caused by excessive paging. The hard drive gurgles away but cpu usage might be near 0. Why this much paging is required with >100Mb RAM available I don't know. Maybe I should increase the size of the page file. I already ran Ashampoo's tune up tool which made no discernable difference.

Drakar

Yes the updates definately affect performance. Most of them are security updates and end up having to perform extra checks etc, they weren't written with performance in mind. If you have the machine connected to the internet you pretty much have to have them though...

Capt'n Midnight

Drakar wrote: »

Yes the updates definately affect performance. Most of them are security updates and end up having to perform extra checks etc, they weren't written with performance in mind. If you have the machine connected to the internet you pretty much have to have them though...

In the past microsoft put performance/ease of use ahead of security. Now there is more security, but service pack 3 for XP will be interesting, a real wait and see job IMHO to see if the fixes / freebies are worth the possible performance hit / restrictions

BigEejit

I'm sure I read something on the inquirer (yes, I was wearing several items of apparel from my tinfoil wardrobe) about MS making fixes use a lot more cpu cycles than was actually needed so that Vista wouldnt appear to be significantly slower than it.

But for the OP, all those fixes are pretty much necessary as the number one target of script kiddies is like a swiss cheese without them.

squibs

Wow - thats pretty bad if true! I'd love to see somebody decompile the patches and make the findings public. Probably not possible though.

subway

make sure you are running windows update only, and not microsoft update.
ive seen that almost kill a few machines.