XP Pro very slow on dual 333. Should I use w2k ?

[viguy]

Hello all,
I had NT4 on my dual 333, 256M Ram, with SCSI hard drives. It ran alright... decent. I know it's old but it was fine with NT on it.

I now installed Win XP Pro and it seems very slow. I turned off ALL eye-candy. No effects what so ever now. It got better, but it's still slow. Seems slower then when I had NT4 on it. If I type too fast i have to wait for it to appear on the screen sometimes. (I leave McAffee disabled.)

I also notice that whenever I move my mouse, the csrss.exe process jumps from 0% to about 10% cpu usage. When I stop moving the mouse it drops back to 0%. That seems a little much for me just for mouse-movement. (When I had mouse shadows on it would jump to 40%!)

Would switching to W2k make a difference for me ??

Any ideas ?

(The install took several hours to complete. Someone told me that it might be a bad install of XP because it should not take that long. But nothing seems broken except for the speed.)

 

[cdogg]

Upgrading from NT 4 to Win2K or WinXP isn't going to speed up the overall performance of an older PC. Both 2000 and XP use the NT 5.x kernel which stresses system memory and pagefiles more heavily than NT 4.0. Plus, you probably have too many processes/apps starting up with Windows.

At this point, I would consider upgrading the system with faster procs. You're not getting anywhere near 500MHz performance, even with dual 333's. Both are probably operating at the equivalent of a 400MHz PII together, since a lot of processes aren't optimized to take advantage of both procs simultaneously.

The order in which I would upgrade severe bottlenecks in your system:

1) CPU
2) RAM (at least 384MB, 512MB preferable)
3) Hard drive (unless your SCSI outperforms a cheap IDE 7200RPM with 8MB cache).

*Note: All 3 can easily be upgraded with a new mobo, giving you access to faster DDR RAM, CPU, and ATA 100/133.

~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind"
[tab][tab]- Aristotle

 

[bcastner]

Assuming that when you upgraded the correct HAL was used, that you have upgraded the BIOS of your system for Windows XP compatability, then cdogg is right on the money.

I would do the RAM upgrade to 512 first.

 

[jurgen36]

The install should not take several hours. I usually can do a complete XP install within 29 to 39 minutes depending on the MOBO. If you installed over a NT4 system it could take possible as much as one hour. I would try a reinstall with the repair option. If that does not help try more memory or MOBO or Processor. XP will be slower as NT4 but it should not be as slow as you described. I even had XP running with 64 K of memory, it was very slow but even then it did not take seconds for the mouse to operate. Greetings Jurgen

 

[bcastner]

And some motherboard and chipset level driver updates as well.

These are beyound the BIOS update side of things (that you must do).

If using Intel (or VIA or Sis) see if there have not been a lot of underlying chipset upgrades done as well.

I think if I was doing an upgrade I would force an abstraction layer (after a BIOS setting change) for a uniprocesor model ACPI model. Then enable the multiprocessor HAL.

But would most certainly have everything that Intel, VIA or SiS has done for the chipset level, and everything done by the mother manufacturer for the BIOS.

A repair install with all of these aspects in place would be my personal next step (as well as a bump of RAM to 512).

I hope you realize that the newer PIII uniprocessor, PIV, multiprocesor Xeon and other chipsets will beat the pants of your formerly high-end machine. There is little you can do about cache and other issues. But it should not work as poorly as you describe.

 

[cdogg]

I overlooked that little footnote that it took several hours to install XP. Like the others have said, if this was a clean install of XP, then perhaps some device (mobo chipset, NIC, etc) is slowing down the entire process because it is not part of XP's HCL (Hardware Compatibility List):

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/catalog/.

The obvious problem though, as bcastner has suggested, appears to be that the correct HAL might not be in use.

More info on HAL:

http://whatis.techtarget.com/wsearchResults/1,290214,sid9,00.html?query=hardware+abstraction+layer

http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid1_gci797772,00.html

~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind"
[tab][tab]- Aristotle