slow laptop

WhiteWashMan

i have a celron 333 latop here that im working on and its dog slow.
i mean its seriously slow.
it took over 2 hours to set up the winnt install alone.
and at boot up it takes about 4 minutes to boot to a login screen.
theres nothing that i can think of, it has 64mg ram, so it should be ok, ot mega fast or anything, but its enough for the job.
any hints on tyhings i can check?

JustHalf

Celeron 333 with 64 megs of RAM and NT?

No reason in hell that should be going slow. :rolleyes:

strat

very constructive reply there JH :rolleyes:


Is it hanging anywhere or just slow in general ?

low-level format/scandisk/defrag the HD maybe ?
reset/update bios ?
any conflicts?

Saruman

how long does it take to get into VGA mode?
Bye the way 64mb is not a lot... check how much hard drive space you have available as NT WILL be using hard drive space for its swop file.. make sure you have enough free.. about 200 mb minimum!

WhiteWashMan

theres plenty of hard drive space available.
its nothing to do with the OS, as ive tried win98 o it and win2k on it and they have all had varying degrees of slowness.
no, its a mtter of seek times, hard drive speed, just over all slowness of hardware, which i cant seem to figure out as there is no reason it should be slow.
unfortunately its a POS laptop and the maker has decided that there should be no files, or updates, or anything so thats really helpful of them.

well done just half, youve managed to paraphrase my last 2 lines.
youre so helpful sometimes....

Saruman

Well if its not OS related then may be hard drive related.. in which case a low level format may be best as was previously suggested by StrataGIST

WhiteWashMan

hmm, all this has been done.
just wondering if anyone had any idea why a system would run slow.
maybe i will give the bios a little tweak and see what happens

WhiteWashMan

oh, i dont think its the hard drive by the way as this is the second one ive tried and both ave same slowness..

Saruman

maybe your getting mem leaks or something.. dont know.. sure its not just a case your used to faster computers so it just seems slow?

WhiteWashMan

lol, no i dont think its that.
personaly i have pII 300. mind you ihave 3 time sthe memory, but its still faster at al lthe non oS things.
like i said, THE OS part seems grand, its just anything that ive tried to do outside of it.
i guess i will just leave it ,as it runs fine within NT. i just like to figure these things out for future reference. might help me or someone else at some stage.

WhiteWashMan

by the way, turned mmy power settings in the bios to max performance and it seems to be grand.
so as long as i dont take out the plug, it should be ok.
never seen that one before.
then again, i never saw a graphics card disabled in devices in nt before either

Hobbes

My laptop does that as well. It was dirt cheap and high spec but not great for long time without power.

NT in 64mb though? that would be pig slow anyway.

Another thing to check is if you installed NT workstation or server. Both act differently. Workstation will be better for work done directly on the machine, where as server for background tasks (foreground slow to a crawl).

I know how to switch between the two in W2K, can't remember how in NT.

Also check your services, might have more running then you need. For example index services aren't vital and can be disabled for speed.

WhiteWashMan

simon, you are going to make me cry now.

please believe me when i say i know im intalling NT i mean workstation and not server.
luckily i read a book once and it showed the difference between the two.
also, believe me please when i say that i know about services etc and i know that these occur within the OS.
and please please please believe me when i say that it isnt the OS.
k?

marauder

Did you say its OK when its on the mains and slow on battery?
Have you tried a different battery? Try turning off ALL pwer management in the BIOS and see if it improves

Also, I suggests running SiSoft Sandra on it... You may be able to id the bottleneck that way....

podgeen

you say uve tried a different harddrive,
you know its not the os,
How about borrow/aquiring some extra ram and see how it runs?
Just to rule out that possibility of it being anything to do with ram.

sutty

eammo.....what celly is it? If its an old one it wont have lots of cashe or even on die cashe. That could account for some of the slowness. You have to remember.....P3's are a good bit faster...even lower MHz. Also if its hard drive mode is using DMA or just PIO? in which case it will be as slow as hell. I'd say the ram is running at 66MHz right? do you know what CAS its set to? can shave off a few seconds when it comes down to it.