Slowish System (but shouldnt be)

Turner

Ok boyz and girls. I'll set the scene first. I have a
dell PIII 1ghz
256mb ram
geforce2 32mb.
windows 2000

What ive noticed is that loading time (ie start up) takes a while (even with all but 1 or 2 of my start up items disabled.)

Also when i click on internet explorer it takes maybe 4-5 seconds to load. And ive no homepage i use a blank one.

Now i know when im in work (p2 300mhz with 128mb ram) internet explorer just pops straight up when you click it.
Generally my system isnt performing to what i think it should be.

Have any of yiz any suggestions.

Chief.

chernobyl

Clean install of windows 2000 will sort it out.
Theres no way to speed the windows 2000 "bootup", unfortunatley if its dying then kill it now.

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Ashley Lyn

Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Turner

its only 3 months old and dell dont give you a windows installation cd

seamus

Yeah, there's something suss about production comps. Mate of mine got a compaq P3, 128RAM, Win2K, and when I looked at the 'performance' yokie 2 days after he got it, it said it only had 68% resources free, and wintune tells him it only has 12K free RAM! I mean, what the fook?

astrofool

dells and compaqs and retail pc's come with alot of stuff loaded in them that will be taking up vast heaps of memory, try turning off windows sounds, they take up a bit.

as for being a slow loader, remember these OEM's generally sell the computer based on chip, and sometimes graphics, never the other components or their quality. Usually slow HD's (but big) a motherboard that "does the job" built in sound etc. try a defragment, sounds like a slow HD tbh (IE doesn't load out of the RAM most times)

phobos

I dunno there has to be somehthing wrong there!. I practically have half the machine he has and I am gettin pretty good performance. It's a P3 700Mhz, with 128RAM, TNT2 (but that's not relevant here). The machine boots in under 30 seconds, and IE will open it about 2.x seconds. TBH I thought that was slow coz I was going to get a RAM, HD, and OS upgrade. But there has to be somethin (software wise) that is slowing the machine down.

Start it up in Safe mode and do the usual and clock it's performance. How big is your HD and how fast is it?

If it's huge partition it!, keeping the OS in the fastest partition. Because what's always running from when you turn on the PC until you shut it down. The OS!.

;-phobos-)

_CreeD_

I think the various drivers you have, and the amount of ram can be a problem for Win2k. I've 1.2Ghz/768mb/Win2k running on a Raid-0 Array (2xIbm 75Gxps) and it takes about a minute to boot (win98 used to take 17 seconds). My brothers 866-p3/128mb takes half that.
More Ram = Win2k loading more of itself at startup.

If you enable Hybernate it will always create a hyb. file equal to your ram size. I wonder if this is just a dummy created quickly until needed or if it actually takes time at startup? I'd be curious to know if you have it enabled or not.
And definitely defrag. It seems to make more of a difference to Win2k than 98.

Turner

Come to think of it i have installed about 2-3 gigs of mp3's lately so defraggin might be a good idea.

Ill also try getting some new drivers (cheers gerry).

Chief.

astrofool

partitioning the drive in no way makes it quicker, you're better off with good defragmenting that will place the most recently used items on the outer faster edge of the platters

partitioning is good if you want to keep drive d while formatting drive c, but drive c will be the one at the inner edge, meaning the partition that needs the performance won't be getting it, but rather the partition at the end of the drive. Best way to back up is a second HD, stops the whole HD crashing losing all info thing

I ran win2k on this system, but soon went back to Me, too many peripherals on it for win2k, actually made it less stable, whereas Me never crashes on me (except after roger wilco has been run, messes up the directx). XP might be the answer, win2k ain't there yet.

And in safe mode it will run slower, lack of 32 bit drivers normally does it(on Me only), + does win2k have safe mode? ain't had to use it myself on win2k if it is there.

chernobyl

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Gerry:



Chernobyl, whats the point in getting XP? It would be slower than win2k.

</font>

The guy has not got win2k on disk and he can have RCx which is faster than win2k and for free

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Ashley Lyn

Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Gavin

As said above, the hibernate option is quite useful. I tend to log off and instead of shutdown, hibernate. It does improve boot up times, cause win2000 doesn't go looking for all your hardware when it recovers.

On my machine, pIII450 with ultra2 scsi 80mb/s hd's it takes nearly 2 minutes to boot because of a bloody long pause in the middle of boot up where it seems to go and look for all the hardware in the machine. Annoying.

Just whilst sort of on topic. What's a good hd benchmarking program. Sandra yokie ?

Gav

Gerry

xp is faster? This is news to me. Anandtech seems to reckon that common applications ( like office etc) run 20-30% slower, and are still slower when you turn off all the fancy xp features.

Gerry

Verb, sandra is a reasonable hd benchmark. The better ones (like hd tach www.tcdlabs.com ) are not concerned with preserving data

Turner

Cheers lads,

hard drive = 20gigs. Dunno what speed.

Win98 was always quicker, im half thinking about going back to it.

Chief

chernobyl

get yourself a copy of XP, you can download it from microsoft FTP.

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Ashley Lyn

Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Gerry

I'm not sure why your system is so slow, I reckon you have to start afresh, and only install what you have to. Personally I find win2k just as fast as win98, once you have 256 megs of ram.

IE starts pretty much instantly. Win2k loads up in about a minute. And it is very fast to finish loading after I log in.

I'm running win2k at the moment with 128, and while it is a little slower, it's worth it for the extra stability. Chernobyl, whats the point in getting XP? It would be slower than win2k.

I reckon defragmenting would be a good start. You also should have the latest intel i815 drivers.

_CreeD_

Actually with Win9x and Fat32 you are better off partitioning to <8gb. The file system goes to pot after that.

Even though it does seem a little slower than 98 at booting I still prefer Win2k. It just 'feels' better, you don't worry so much about your system going belly up in the middle of something important.

Ronin

Chief,

I've always found that once I get a new box in, trashing and reinstalling from scratch always worked better then just going with the box as is. All the preinstalled crap cause's problems..

Just do a fresh install or better yet install unix ..

Ro

seamus

Nah, he couldn't use Unix, Simon barely knows much about windows as is lol

Turner

Who the f<ck are you seamus ?

jaarius

i waould say a clean minimum install of win(what you are using) if that solves it then you are talking ram guzzeling apps/programs are running. if the problem remains could be dodgy parts. before dell(or anyone) releases a comp to a customer there are multiple hardware/software tests but they dont always (in fact rarely) "push the envelope" cause it takes too much time. a full through test of every theing can take up 20hrs somestimes more. it probably takes about 20-30 minutes to build a pc on a production line (more if custom)so spending up to a day testing is bad for production.

if its only 3months old then it should still be under warranty. if you do this make sure that you hit the Csupport guys with a few techie terms. that way they wont neccessarily fob you off as some 'mommy bought you a puter for chistmas' types.


j

seamus

haha e-page boy, you should be able to guess, my name is part of my email add.

Turner

ya ya wicklow boy.