High cpu-load hogs computer too much

[Daniel =?iso-8859-1?Q?Lidstr=F6m?=]

Hi,

whenever I do something that is both disk- and cpu-intensive the entire
operating system hogs down just too much. How can that be? I have a 2.6GHz+
Athlon Xp with 512 Mb ram. So there shouldn't be much problem. Compared to
my Linux box (3GHz, 1Gb ram) this computer is so much slower, when a few
processes eat up the resources. It seems to me that the process scheduler
of the Windows XP kernel is way inferior to that of the Linux kernel. Just
as an example: when I am compiling a large project using .Net 2003,
launching Mozilla FireFox takes 23s. While I haven't measure the equivalent
on my other system I believe the same thing would take around 3-5s.

 

[D.R.]

Hi,

whenever I do something that is both disk- and cpu-intensive the entire
operating system hogs down just too much. How can that be? I have a 2.6GHz+
Athlon Xp with 512 Mb ram. So there shouldn't be much problem. Compared to
my Linux box (3GHz, 1Gb ram) this computer is so much slower, when a few
processes eat up the resources. It seems to me that the process scheduler
of the Windows XP kernel is way inferior to that of the Linux kernel. Just
as an example: when I am compiling a large project using .Net 2003,
launching Mozilla FireFox takes 23s. While I haven't measure the equivalent
on my other system I believe the same thing would take around 3-5s.

In Windows its common for programs to select what cpu priority they use. An
example is Nero Vision 2. When encoding mpeg2 video you can set the cpu priority
to maximun and other apps take minutes sometimes to open while it does it's
thing. You can also set the cpu priority to low and continue to work on other
apps while it encodes, but the encoding does takes longer. The default which is
a compromise. I set mine to max and go away for a few minutes/hours depending on
what the encoding is.

It is my guess that Microsoft want their compiler to be very fast and have set
the cpu priority to max.

 

[Alex Nichol]

whenever I do something that is both disk- and cpu-intensive the entire
operating system hogs down just too much. How can that be? I have a 2.6GHz+
Athlon Xp with 512 Mb ram. So there shouldn't be much problem. Compared to
my Linux box (3GHz, 1Gb ram) this computer is so much slower, when a few
processes eat up the resources. It seems to me that the process scheduler
of the Windows XP kernel is way inferior to that of the Linux kernel.

This sounds to me like Hard disk drivers that have got into a PIO mode,
which is a very CPU intensive way of accessing a disk - but reliable.
It therefore is used as a fall back if there is a burst of errors from a
drive, and sticks there. Presuming IDE type drives, go to Control Panel
- System - Hardware - Device Manager and look for ATA IDE/ATAPI
Controllers
Open that, d-click in turn on Primary channel and secondary, look on the
Advanced page to be sure that 'Transfer mode' is selected as DMA if
available; *and* that the Current mode is appropriate. If it is on PIO,
go to the master level controller, just above Primary, and Action -
Remove. OK out and reboot for Plug n Play to set it up again. If it
still sticks, look inside for any reason for the error bursts - eg a bad
cable (UDMA needs one with 80 wires) of badly seated ones.