XP Performance 1

[maverick964uk]

Hi,

I have two PC's at home.....
advent laptop - celeron 900, 128MB RAM, 15GB disk, XP Pro
DIY desktop - AMD 800, 128MB RAM, 20GB disk, XP Home

Both systems seem to be slow quite a bit especially doing things I would consider to be normal. There also seems to be plenty of disk i/o at these slow times. In my view, its either slow disks or a RAM/virtual memory issue.

I'm not sure if XP is RAM intensive as I am inclined to upgrade both to 256MB RAM. Also could this disk i/o be page file usage?. If so, how can I make the system use more RAM rather than disk virtual space?

I am a unix person and there are certain things to consider when configuring virtual memory that can help performance, however I'm not sure what I can do to help things here with my PC's.

Final point, any benefits to tweaking processor scheduling or memory usage?

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Your instinct is right - XP is incredibly RAM intensive, and 128Mb is just not enough. 256Mb is nice, 512 is better. In fact, unlike Windows 9.x/ME (and like UNIX!), you can just throw RAM at XP and it will use it. Exponentially, performance stops the dramatic improvements around the 512Mb mark, however.

The disk I/O you refer to is indeed page file usage, since XP tends to use around 160Mb RAM just to load the O/S. Once you start actually doing stuff, it has to swap everything out. If the Hard disks are sharing IDE channels with CD drives, this can also impact performance, particularly if the hard disks are ATA66 or faster.

Your processors should handle XP just fine, but you may want to turn off some of the fancy graphics if you aren't running a fast graphics card. This is easily done by right-clicking the Start Menu and editing the properties. If you'd like more details on this, please post back.

There are tweaks around for processor and memory usage, but they are no way as effective as their UNIX counterparts, and tend to shift system bottlenecks elsewhere rather than completely cure problems. TweakXP is a useful tool - I got it free on a magazine coverdisk, so I'd imagine it's free for download somewhere.

I wrote an FAQ on Virtual Memory that is in the PC Hardware forum. 'Fraid I wrote it in a lunchtime, so it's not wonderful, but it may help. Windows XP does a fairly good job by itself, however.

Finally, Windows XP Inside Out is a superb book on this Operating System that doesn't treat you like a complete noob. Again, if you'd like more info, please reply.

Hope this is helpful. CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[linney]

Here are a couple of links you can check out to see if they make any difference.

Try disabling any unrequired services that are running in background. The Indexing service is a good one to start with.

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

HOW TO: Set Performance Options (Q308417)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q308/4/17.asp

 

[maverick964uk]

thanks for all the help.

It would be nice to have a list of services that are not required, however I'm sure this info is locked away somewhere.

thanks again.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

That blkviper link is really good - it lists the services you don't need (to some extent...).

It's all dependent on the situation, of course - XP activates all the services that are most common, then expects you to find the ones you don't need.

Dig deeper into that link. CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk