Will Win2k Slowdown?

[lupini]

Hi I have three 1ghz machines each with 128 MB of Ram running a Win2kPro network. I keep them reasonably well maintained (defraged, SP4) and we have not added lots of new software. Should I expect performance (speed) to deteriorate over time? Initially 128 MB seemed fine for our purposes, now I'm wondering if I need more RAM though I haven't substantially added to our usual running configurations.

Question 2: I tweaked an XP system I look after as well by disabling unneeded services etc. and it sped up more than when I upgraded the RAM to 512 MB. Any advice on the usefulness/effecacy of such tweaks in Win2K would be appreciated - before I start mucking around on three more machines....

Thanks a lot!

 

[soaplover]

With that little ram you would expect alot of swap file fragmentation if it's set to managed by windows .Witch in turn leads to other files excessive fragmantation as a result of auto sizing of the swap file .
What i recommend is to measure the mem load at the workstation under normal business operation , and set the swap file with permanent size . Then do a bootvis first followed by a defragment pass that only defrags paging file . Then last a normal defrag for applications.
This i think would make if stay tuned over time .Of course defragment pass ocationally for the apps .

PerfectDisk 6 has the possibility to manage remote computers ( and is in fact recommended by Microsoft)




//Regards Soaplover

 

[wolluf]

I wouldn't expect the 2k machines performance to particularly degrade over time (mine haven't) - but I would suggest 256MB is a better level of RAM to use (my 2k's basically uses c. 128MB RAM shortly after loading). Soaplover's suggestion to fix pagefile size is also a good one of course.

 

[FredUG]

It's not that win2k slowed down (theoretically) it's your perception that's changed. What used to be fast (to you) now seems slow because you got used to it. BTW, add more ram, it's cheap and it's a great performance boost, in you case.

Good luck,

FredUG

 

[soaplover]

My suggestion was of course based on sticking with 128M.
I agree with you wolluf that W2K suffers with 128M. It will also depend on the quality/speed of the HDD and the IDE-chl/chipset how much is breaks the user under heavy pagefile accessing.
When i was running W2K i jumped up to 384M after a while.
(laptop w/ata66 & SODIMM pc100) even 256M was cloggy .But in my work i'm using alot of multitasking with lots of apps open.
It sure has a lot to do with type of user..

//Regards Soaplover