Dell Dimension 8250, sluggish

[TGulics]

Howdy folks. I've had this Dell Dimension 8250 (P4 3.0, 512 RDRAM) for a few months now, and I've been plagued by a very strange issue: sluggish performance.

Notably, when I fire up a game of Battlefield 1942 or similar titles, my computer runs like crud after I've closed the game down. XP desktop graphics take long to update, windows take forever to switch, etc, etc. Slowly my performance will return to normal, or I can reboot and get speedy again.

My question is, why is this happening? I can't recall a computer where this EVER happened to me before. I've never run with XP, though. Is it a matter of my PC using the HD for virtual memory, "thrashing" as some say?

I've performed a bunch of speed tweaks on this machine, some registry edits and disabling some features (indexing service, etc) and they have helped, but not immensely. I clean for spyware regularly, and have no viruses. My HD is not in PIO mode, or at least that is what XP says.

My only other alternative, other than buying more ram, is to wipe the HD and install a fresh XP. I'm still running on Dell's XP install, but I -have- removed a lot of their crap.

Any help?

 

[Dreamland]

How big of a hard drive? How is it partitioned - one giant one or ? You can just about always get more performance out of XP by using a few smaller partitions if you have a drive over 20GB. And if you're using NTFS on a particularly large drive, the problem becomes worse as NTFS spreads files all over the platter and maintains a backup MFT at the 'end' of the partition.

You mentioned that you turned indexing off - how about the system restore? [My Computer - Properties - System Restore Tab - Settings] If you have a massive single partition and a large restore cache, you're hard drive will churn quite a bit every startup. Don't disable it, but don't make it huge. Selectively enabling this feature per partition with a well partitioned disk makes it fly.

Have you defragged lately? XP on either FAT32 or NTFS get's quite fragmented over time.

You have plenty of RAM, so don't allow XP to build a huge swap file. You don't need 512MB of physical RAM and another 1.2GB of swap file unless you're editing true color posters in Photoshop or have twelve instances of Battlefield 1942 running at once. I really don't think you need or will see any performance difference by adding more RAM - this isn't your problem (or shouldn't be...)

Try running SiSoft or HDTach to see what the actual performance of your HD is. If it's unusually slow, you might try running the drive manufacturer's utilities for finding and restoring corrupt sectors. If XP detects too many IDE errors, it will throttle back the interface speed at the O/S level without you ever knowing. XP may be running the IDE port at ATA-33 speeds even though you have it set to use (or it reports) UDMA5 in the XP advanced settings for the HDD controller in System.

 

[TGulics]

It's a 60 GB hard drive, one NTFS partition. I have Diskeeper defragging every night at 2 AM.

How large a swap file do you recommend? I'm at 768 MB now.

Startup is fast, so I'm not too worried about System Restore. It's at 5% of my drive, or around 3 gig.

I'll try your recommendation on the HDTach/SiSoft stuff and will report back. Thanks!

 

[Dreamland]

System restore monitors changes to your drive all the time, not just during startup. It's most active just *after* startup (when you are seeing the slowness) so you might actually try disabling it for a day or two to see if it's related. 3GB is also a pretty beefy chunk of drive to set aside for restore unless you're doing a lot of changes to the system. The disk space isn't the issue, it's the updates to what is essentially a compressed 3GB 'bakcup file' that potentially whacks performance.

768MB for your swap file is not excessive. I keep mine smaller for performance (marginally more at best and probably mostly just imaginary) but no need to mess with yours - it's reasonable at it's current size.

Just in case this may apply - you will see performance degrade slowly as your drive (partition, actually) starts getting more than 75% full or >45GB, but it's *usually* not noticeable until you start passing something like the 90% level.

 

[relaksuah]

Since you've just started using WinXP, have you tried turning off the visual effects in WinXP? the visual effects of WinXP are quite unique as well as being a memory eater. right click on My Computer, click on properties, click on advanced, click on performance settings. you can see lots of effects stated there. click on Adjust for best performance. If you'd like to keep the look of WinXP on your machine, scroll down on the menu to tick on Use visual styles on windows and buttons before you click on Apply. This helps on even Celeron PCs as it takes away a huge memory eater off. Give it a try.