Computer seems slow and uses the harddrive a lot.

[tonemgub]

I have the following setup:
2000 XP Athlon, 768MB DDR Ram , 8X DVD Burner, DVD Rom, 80 GB Hardrive (Hitachi, 1 year old), 20GB (4 years old) Hardrive. Running Windows XP Pro. Operating system on the 80GB.
I dont know if I am paranoid but I beleive my computer is in some way using the page file a lot instead of the memory. Previously I only had 256 MB of memory and it seemed very slow so I upgraded with an additional 512MB. On looking at things it doesnt seemed to have helped very much. When I run up software such as Ulead DVD Movie or Sonic DVDit. The hardrives runs forever and the program can take well over a minute to load up. Also once the program is up and on the screen the hardrive is still whirling around and I have to wait until all hardrive activity is finished before I can get near the program. I realise that if I am encoding or decoding then this is very CPU and hardrive intensive but this happens way before I get down to producing anything. I have read on various websites that I should have both harddrives on cable select as with the new IDE cables they choose which is master and which is slave. I have tried the harddrives as Master and Slave but it doesnt solve the problem. The computer is free of Virus' and free of Spyware. Maybe I am expecting a little too much out of my system but I am sure I have seen less spec computers run faster than mine.

Chris

[waheed]

When is the last time you defragmented your hard drive. If you do alot of endcoding, you will need to defrag quite often.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

yup yup, defrag often if you do a lot of capturing and/or encoding.
I defrag once a week.
Be sure to use a GOOD defrag program, not that useless crap that comes with Windows.
I've had very good results with O&O Defrag on the "SPACE" setting.
Also, go into your Control Panel and click "System" > "Advanced" and under "Performance", click "Settings". Now choose "Adjust for best performance" and click "Apply".
In addition, it's not a bad idea to run Disk Cleanup and/or get a program that deletes garbage files (always run this BEFORE you defrag) and it certainly wouldn't hurt to get a registry 'cleaner' program.
Finally, you may want to change the size of your pagefile (a lot of folks suggest making it twice the size of your RAM if you can spare the disk space) and there are even programs that can defrag the page file.
If you have the time and patience, you can move the page file from your "C:" drive to the other drive (this will require a reboot), then defrag the C drive with a good defrag proggy while the page file is on the other drive. Once that's done, move the page file back to the C drive (requires yet another reboot) and defrag your other drive. This should move all of your files the the "front" (inner area) of the C drive and when you move the page file back, it should put it near the "end" (outer area) of the drive, thus improving your file access times.
Good luck.

[HillJack]

<On Preview, I see that Xylob the Destroyer has written pretty much the same thing, but I'll keep it anyway 'cause it was alot to write >

You should also check your system paging file setting - make it a static paging file as opposed to dynamic (the default). Also check the timestamp of c:\pagefile.sys to help determine if it's being used alot.

With a dynamic paging file, as Windows writes to it, it will grow/shrink and will, over time, get spread out over your drive which will cause delays. With a static paging file, Windows will allocate the entire file to a specific area of your drive and shouldn't have to traverse all over your drive to find space/cache data as needed.

I think the rule-of-thumb for a size is 1.5x the amount of physical RAM in your system - so for you, with 768MB RAM, set it to 1536MB. And if you can choose which drive to place it on, place it on the fastest drive in your system.

You can find these settings in My Computer / Properties / Advanced / Performance Settings / Advanced / Virtual Memory. To make it static set the initial and maxmimum sizes equal, to 1536 in your case. You will have to reboot to allow Windows to allocate the space.

If you decide to change to a static paging file, make sure you defragment your drive first as Windows will need one contiguous chunk of disk space to store the file and if your drive is fragmented it will end up storing it away from the "beginning" of the drive (the fastest part).

[INFRATOM]

Ya the mentioned setup helps to speed up, but if you got sluggish without any change get a good spyware removal like microsoft etc and clean out your computer. Some utilities that load also make you slow (check MSCONFIG), like running anti-virus in realtime on some programs you use. Exclude some of your programs from virus check if they are not a source for viruses. One final thought reformating HD will take you back to the first day of your computer, if(1) it was good in the begining and if(2) you couldn't figure it out rebuilding may save time if you have done it before.

[INFRATOM]

2 other things to check, 1- if you have adequate power supply 2- if your cpu is over heating. I didn't see you said you are free of spyware, I doubt that is possible in that sense, lets phrase it like .. could not detect any.. most programs are (have) spywares they all contact their HQ's for enhancement purposes.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

ja, Ad-Aware and a good anti-virus (Norton works fine for me) can help keep you 'clean'.

Check your Task Manager -- a non-networked home PC really shouldn't have more than 30 processes running at the max, if you've got much more than that, there's definitely WAY TOO MUCH crap loading when you boot your PC.
msconfig.exe is a good place to start and you can play around in Services.msc to keep some of the stupid shit from starting (Print Spooler for example, if you rarely print, set it to "Manual" -- it only takes a few clicks to start it back up).

If you're bold and you think you know what you're doing, you can go into regedit and under your CURRENT_USER, LOCAL_MACHINE, and CURRENT_CONFIG you then go to SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>Run and delete keys for the needless shit (Nero, Roxio, etc).

Keep in mind that Services.msc, msconfig.exe, and the regedit.exe stuff is all pretty minor though -- these are the little tweaks.
Definitely defrag and look into getting some good anti-virus and anti-spyware proggys.

[handyguy]

Also mentioned is Content Indexing. That is actually something they (MS) agrees can slow your computer down. It can be turned off tho. It's just so you can search for files faster.

[guns1inger]

The days of static pages files being the fastest for performance died with 2000/XP. The memory management is much better, especially under XP, and the recommendation now is to leave windows to do it's own thing with the pagefile whenever possible. This is contrary to Win98/ME/NT4, where a static pagefile at least 1.5 - 2 times the size of physical ram was the best way to go.

Windows creates a pagefile of approx 1.5 times your physical ram and only under strange circumstances reduces this file. It may extend it, if necessary, however again, this should not happen under normal use.

check the task manager under the Performance tab and look at the Commit Charge (K) section. There are three figures shown there - Total : Current Usage, Limit : All available memory (physical + virtual), and Peak : the highest amount used this session (ie. since you switched on). If Peak => physical ram then you are paging, and you need to work out why. If it is less than the total physical ram and you still have a lot of disk activity, then the cause is something else reading the disk for it's own reasons - virus, spyware, background process etc. An example of a legit program could be a background defragger.

If you find that your Peak is greater than your physical memory, and you haven't been running something like a 3D renderer (a major memory hog), then you may have a memory leak in a service or process, or a program. A memory leak is where a program requests memory, then doesn't return it to the OS, even though the OS may think it has. Again, using the task mamanger, look for processes using a large amount of memory. Anything over 50mb should be treated as suspicious if you have programs running. If you still can't find it, then you need to remove all startup programs references from the startup folder and the registry, then add them back one at a time until you find the culprit. Once located, look for an update to it, or uninstall it.

Even the big boys can screw up like this. HP's jetdirect admin service for windows leaks like a siv under W2K Server. Our print server lasts less than 12 hours with this service running before running out of all memory. (512 mb physical, 1.2GB virtual). You can actually sit and watch the memory usage creep up while nothing else is running. Turn off this service and memory usage stays constant at 240mb +/- 15mb. Unfortunately, memory leaks can be one of the hardest things to track down. Good luck.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...If you still can't find it, then you need to remove all startup programs references from the startup folder...

I knew I was forgetting one of those "little tweaks"!

[Faustus]

Check your DMA mode while your at it.

[tonemgub]

Hi,
many thanks for all the tips on this one guys I really appreciate it. I did a good old defrag and a few of the tweaks that a few of you have recommended and the old girl is running like a charm. It seems I havent been cleaning up my mess after converting and so on.
Many thanks,
Chris