Kathie said:
We run only one program, I installed and maintain for the company. When
the
program was first installed 2 yrs ago is when this computer was upgraded
to
XP for the program. The RAM may have been upgraded as well, I don't have
updated specs. Plus the POS software is not actually installed on this
computer.
You shouldn't have a problem shifting to NTFS, but on the other hand, it
likely won't affect performance much, either.
Any time you are making a change like this, you should be sure you have a
current backup.
As to doing this for compatibility, applications don't generally care at all
about the filesystem - the OS does.
Your application probably wants you to use NTFS for system reliability and
security reasons, *not* compatibility reasons.
One exception to that statement would be if the application generates files
in excess of 4gb. FAT32 disks just can't do that, but the symptom will not
be slowness.
In the end, if you're looking at a performance issue - it's probably not due
to NTFS. A symptom of a failing hard disk can be performance
degradation - the OS is trying and trying to verify the disk reads and takes
longer and longer.
Hard disks do have limited life spans, yours sounds like it is at least 3 or
4 years old. Drives are cheap now (where I am, 80 gig drives, if you can
find them, are around $40, and 500's are around $70), and if you suspect
this, it's probably worth just replacing the drive. These days this is a
trivial task.
As a quick check, open the system and look at the date of manufacture on
the drive, and the model number. Now look up the model number on Google,
and in the drive specs look for MTBF - Mean Time Before Failure.
You can probably clone the drive to a new one in an hour or so. If the
cloning fails due to disk error, well, you've found the performance problem.
HTH
-pk
