Another XP question

[Steve]

Hi folks,

I'm a little concerned about my XP Home installation. This thing is SLOOOOW! It works alright. But noticably SLOOOW.

This is on a Toshiba laptop. Model 2405, P4 1.6Ghz, 256MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM, 30gig HDD.

I literally have to WAIT for this OS to do it's thing. This can't be right. I don't have to wait long, but with the other M$ OS's that I use (w2k, 98se, 95) I don't have to wait at all!

I've gone through the BlackViper list and turned off as many services as I can. I have 21 services running. I shut off system restore and indexing. Defragged the harddrive. Deleted TIF, TEMP and history.

Am I missing something? :(

[Rick]

What do you have turned on (enabled) in System properties / Advanced Tab / Performance ?

Turning off some of the bells and whistles should help

[Steve]

Thanks Rick. I just checked. I have EVERYTHING turned on. What do you suggest I turn off.

[jabarnutcase]

Steve-
While you're talking to Rick, some that I turned off were the "animate windows..." (Now they "snap" open and closed like I'm used too) instead or appearing to go slow.
And also most of the "fade and slide stuff".
Also, what was the verdict on your DMA? (Device manager/controllers/Pri ide channel/advanced settings) Is it enabled on your HDD?
A couple of other people I know had the same problem when they first installed XP...It was disabled, causing VERY slow peformance.

[Rick]

I use the Best performance check box.
Turned off Everything

Then if you want or need a feature re-enable it
By checking it

[jabarnutcase]

Yea, I hear you Rick. Turning off EVERYTHING though sure doesn't look as "pretty". :rolleyes:

[Steve]

Rick. I'm with you. I just turned them all off.

Jabernutcase, tell me alittle more about the DMA thing. It doesn't come up in device manager like I expected it to. I checked in BIOS but this laptop BIOS is really kind of thin. Clue me in. :)

[Steve]

Oh yes! Thanks Rick. I'm starting to approach W2k performance. Any more tips?

[jabarnutcase]

Right click on mycomputer/properties/hardware/device manager/ then expand IDE controllers.
Double click (or right click and select properties) of your Primary IDE channel, then select the "Advanced setting" tab.
Under transfer mode for your "device" it should tell you your "current transfer mode"
Hopefully it doesn't say PIO only, but rather some form of DMA mode.

[Steve]

Thanks,

Transfer Mode "DMA if available"

Current Transfer Mode: "Ultra DMA Mode 5"

Seems good?

[jabarnutcase]

Yep!!! You're all set there! Guess you just have to keep tweaking! :D

[Steve]

And happily atweakin' I shall go! :D

[Paul Komski]

Have you thought about trying out Customizer XP (http://www.tweaknow.com/netopt.html) which sea69 has bin pluggin!

[Steve]

Well....YES! I have thought about it. I've looked it over. But I don't know. The way so many people have been bad mouthing aftermarket utilities I thought I would try to have a go at this OS with just the provided utilities.

After turning off the Warner Bros. GUI and all the services and all the "performance" bells and whistles, what do I have? W2k/se? I don't know. I just don't get it.

But!! I'm getting cable internet accesss on Tues. afternoon and will be adding this machine to my network. Maybe I'll find some added value in XP then...:)

[sleddog]

Back to the tweakin' :)

1. Increase your menu speed, the default is conservative. To do this start regedit.exe and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop, find key "MenuShowDelay". Default is 400. I recommend 175-250. [Standard warning: DON'T play with regedit unless you know what you are doing!!!)

2. Along with this, increase your mouse speed a little. Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options. Slide the 'speed' bar up a notch.

Together, these make mousing around a fair bit snappier. Experiment with different combos.

[jabarnutcase]

Good one sleddog!

For those that don't like messing with the registry much, TWEAKUI (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp) found in power toys for XP has the menu speed option too.

(I increased mine like you suggested and it does make things a bit "snappier'.

Great little program for a number of things! :)

[sleddog]

Yes, I use Powertoys for XP, but darned if I can find the menu speed in there. Where is it?

[Steve]

I love tweakin'...;)

Thanks sleddog and Jabernutcase. That reg. tweak was good. I set it at 200. I think it did make a difference. Noticably so. :)

Don't worry about suggesting registry tweaks. I'm not scared! If I mess up, I have the restore disk. And I'm not afraid to use it! :eek:

Thanks to Rick, sleddog and Jabernutcase. Your suggestions have changed this dog of an OS into...well...a snappier dog. :rolleyes:

Keep it comin'. :)

[jabarnutcase]

Hi again fellow tweakers-
sleddog, unless we're talking about two different things, the menu speed in tweakui you find by clicking on "mouse' (without expanding the other mouse options). :)

[sleddog]

Thanks jabarnutcase.

Regards to XP performance, I've decided its a tortoise and alway will be a tortoise. You can tweak it until your blue in the face and you end up with a tweaked tortoise.

Two nights ago my 20gb harddrive stopped. (I mean that literally, it just stopped. Spun down and refused to spin up again.)

I had an old 6gb on the shelf doing nothing so I stuck that in and installed Win 2000. And was shocked at the speed. Without any tweaking. Slower hard drive, but hugely faster overall performance. Applications, large multimegabyte files, all run or load faster. I had to get TweakUI out and slow down the menu speed!

I still have Microsoft Tortoise Home Edition on my laptop, but I suspect it's days are limited.

[jabarnutcase]

You know sleddog- I must admit, with the major tweaking I've done since I installed XP, it is slower than I remember my last OS (98se) on the same computer.

After reading a lot of stuff, some of it I attribute to using the NTFS file system. In fact, (and I've posted this before), here is what comes up after a "PC Pitstop" test:
One or more partitions are using the NTFS file system. Although this file system offers many good features such as encryption and improved security, it is often slower than the FAT32 file system. You may notice a significant performance difference between FAT32 and NTFS partitions on the same drive.
Still though, I really like the OS now that I'm used to it.
I hear what you're saying though...I have never done so much tweaking in my life just to get XP to run as fast as I was used to.

Does seem to defeat the purpose of all the "fancy features" if you have to turn a bunch of them off!

My computer isn't the latest and greatest, but with a 1GIG Athlon and 768mb of ram, I did expect things to hum along at a fairly good clip. I suspect if I went back to 98, (which I won't), I would probably be shocked at how much faster things were now that I've forgotten!

[sleddog]

The NTFS filesystem is significantly and noticeably slower that FAT32. There are two identical P3-900 machines at work running Win 2000, one was formatted NTFS and the other FAT32. The NTFS machine was sluggish compared to the FAT32 one. Notice I said 'was'. It's been reinstalled :) If you don't need the file ownership and permissions features of NTFS, don't bother with it.

I couldn't use Win 98 now. I was a longtime user of NT4, then 2000, then a brief stint with XP. But I'm (almost) over that now :)

My machine is a Duron 600 (which has been running at 1020MHz for nearly 3 years), 256mg RAM. It certainly isn't the latest, but I think its great ;)