The new Dell box is a P4-2.8 GHz, 1 gig ram, no antivirus or multimedia stuff
running in background. All the 98SE boxes are typically PI or PII's at
450-700 MHz. The LAN is all 10/100 megabit using a Linksys VPN firewall box
as a hub and cable modem gateway. Throughput on file copies and such is not
the problem. The problem is how slow XP reads shared directories over the
LAN when those directories contain from 1,000 to 25,000 files. Those
directories have to be read by XP before and after file copying or moving
operations, and XP just hangs for a few minutes at a time while it does that.
It doesn't matter if I use Explorer or some other file manager for these
operations. If I do the same large file copying and moving operations FROM a
98SE box TO the Dell XP box, sitting at one of the 98SE boxes, everything
goes much, much faster as 98SE doesn't have nearly as much internal overhead
to deal with in creating large directory metastructures in memory.
I've also noticed that deleting NTFS directories containing thousands of
files takes a long time. If I delete a directory containing 10,000 files I
have time to go have a smoke, or two, before the operation completes.
For now, I'm chalking this up to internal complexities in dealing with NTFS
file operations. Everything I've found so far in the Microsoft databases
basically says "yeah, XP does that, and there's not much you can do to help".
One suggestion was to get rid of all 8.3 file names, and don't have any
sequentially numbered files with common front ends. This is the most
ludicrous and impractical advice I've ever heard.
I've dealt with all types of older file systems on pc's and other types of
computers and have never seen anything like the overhead that XP has for
directory operations. OS/2 and Linux don't act this way, etc, etc.
I do not expect to find a system setting or tweak that will help.