ati 9800 128MB non-pro / hard drive question

[Fred]

My son just bought an ATI 9800 128MB video card (non pro version).

His PC specs:

(Homebuilt)
WinXP Pro (no service pack) [FAT32]
P4 1.9
512 RDRAM (800Mhz)
30GB Maxtor IDE 5400
ASUS P4T-E Mobo
(Cable-modem)

When he's playing Star Wars Galaxies, he hears the hard drive working and at
the same time sees lag in his game; framerate drops down to 1 during this.
(The average for this game is 21Fps).

His hard drive has 4 partitions: C: has only 2GB; D:, E: and F: have bout
9GB each.
I have set his swap file to 900MB for Max and Min. on drive E: (there is
only 1.5GB of free space on E: , the other partitions don't even have that
much.).

He is wondering if he needs a new 7200 HDD - would this make a difference?
(And if so, should we make that the boot drive (And put games on it) or just
make it the slave and use it to put games on only?)

I am wondering if it would make a difference if I re-partitoned the drive he
has into 1
drive with no partitions (FAT32 or NTFS?)?

We also have Win98SE - is that a better gaming OS? (He did notice that the
online lag disappeared when we installed WinXP Pro, tho).

Also, his computer-wiz cousin says it could be that the Rambus RAM is
incompatible or is causing the lag - is this possible??

One more thing - would he see an improvement if we ugraded the CPU? I think
this mobo goes up to a 2.8 (400fsb).

Thanks for any and al help or advice, even just thoughts....
Fred

 

[Thomas]

WinXP Pro (no service pack) [FAT32]
P4 1.9

I know the P4T-E is socket 478 but I didn't know Intel made a 1.9GHz
Northwood core P4 - did they produce some Willamette cored 478 pin P4s
too..? (256KB L2 cache = Willamette, 512KB L2 cache = Northwood.)

Yes

Thomas.

 

[John Hall]

Sounds like a hard drive space problem. The os has to swap to the hard
drive from time to time no matter how much memory you may have, but with 512
megs of memory your hard drive should not be working that hard. When hard
drive space is low, the hard drive has to work harder for the os to
accomplish swapping because it's more difficult to find free space due to
fragmentation.

A 30 gig hard drive is not that big these days. I would recommend that you
repartition the hard drive and make it one large drive thereby consolidating
free space into one large amount. I addition I recommend switching from
Fat32 to NTFS. NTFS will make more efficient use of the space on your hard
drive and perhaps free up even more space for you swap file. And let the os
handle the swap file automatically. XP does a very good job of doing this.

JK

 

[Fred]

My son has a Soundblaster Live! card.
Thanks,
Fred