Lazycoder

My XP Performance woes

Last month I bit the bullet and decided to install Windows XP Home on my home PC. I immediately noticed a slowdown after booting up. My experience seems contrary to every one elses, so Robert Scoble suggested I post about it here and see if any discussion develops. I’ve got an HP Pavillion AMD 850 Duron w/ 256MB RAM (not top of the line, but not slow either). GeForce400MX (again not top of the line butnot extremely old either)Fresh install, completely wiped the HD and repartitioned (it was dual-booting Linux and 2000 before).First thing, ran Windows Update and patched it up to date, including 2 driver updates(video and LAN). Updated my video driver to try and eeeksome more visual performance out of XP. Grabbed the latest NVidia drivers for XP from their site. No real change, nifty new tools though.Booting – boots fine, faster than 2K Logging on – takes longer than booting up. 65MB profile.So the weirdest parts are: how long applications take to start – most likely due to the virus scanner, but it didn’t seem as bad under Windows 2000 and it doesn’t seem to affect my laptop running Windows 2000 and the same virus scanner. how quickly the system seems to bog down once I start applications. how long it takes to alt-tab between applications. applications report using LESS memory (via task manager) than they did under Windows 2000. (not really anything to do with perf. just strange. Like right now I have 3 tabs open in Firebird and it’s taking up about 25MB on my Windows 2000 system. If I open up the same 3 tabs on my XPmachine it reports using about 19MB?)It seems that once an application has focus, it runs fine (opening new tabs in Firebird can sometimes take a little longer but that reallydepends on how many tabs I have open already). It just takes a long time, and a lot of hard disk activity, to swap. I’ve already thought about standard Microsoft answer #2 – “add more RAM” (#1 being “reboot’ and #3 being “reinstall”). This machine uses PC133 RAM and I figure if I’m going to buy more RAM I should just upgrade the MB and go with faster RAM plus serial ATA. So I’m holding off on that.So right now my performance culprits are: RAM, both amount and speed tray programs – too damn many of them hard drive speed – this install is about a month old and the drive doesn’t need defragging.