How To Speed Up Multiprocessing?

[(PeteCresswell)]

3 ghz Pentium 4 with a gig of memory

Windows XP Professional 2002, SP 2.

System drive=SATA, data drive=IDE.

For instance:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I have four WinZip extracts running concurrently, it kicks the brains out
of the PC. The Zip files are on the same physical (SATA) drive as the system
and the destination directory is on the IDE drive.

CPU usage is only 1-4% and memory usage is less than 350 megs - yet screen
redraws are taking anywhere up to a minute and working in another app is pretty
much hopeless. In TaskMan.Processes, System Idle Process is running 96-98%.

MyComputer.Properties.Advanced.Processor scheduling=Adjust for best performance
of Programs.

MyComputer.Properties.Advanced.MemoryUsage=Adjust for best performance of
Programs.

 

[JS]

How about disk activity.

JS

 

[Jim]

How about disk activity.

JS

Especially since there is only one of them. These disk drives are strange -
they do one thing at a time.
The OP might find things more than just a little better with two drives.
Jim

 

[R. McCarty]

The Disk drive is the "Slowest" aspect of any PC. On my own system
I use the motherboard native SATA channels plus a separate PCI card
that serves external SATA. It's always best to separate Windows and
data to different drives/controllers to allow maximum throughput. Now
with SATA-II and 16-Megabyte disk caches the speed is much better.
Soon we'll start seeing the arrival of drives that have Flash memory in
them. That's one downside to these "Super-Size" drives - many machines
only have a single physical drive in them. Always best to distribute the
workload. (Dual-Core CPUs, Dual-Channel RAM....) I would rather
have three 200-Gigabyte drives than a single 750 or greater.

 

[JS]

Agreed, I also have three drives in both my PCs and try to split the load
for applications and Windows across the drives as much as possible.

JS

The Disk drive is the "Slowest" aspect of any PC. On my own system
I use the motherboard native SATA channels plus a separate PCI card
that serves external SATA. It's always best to separate Windows and
data to different drives/controllers to allow maximum throughput. Now
with SATA-II and 16-Megabyte disk caches the speed is much better.
Soon we'll start seeing the arrival of drives that have Flash memory in
them. That's one downside to these "Super-Size" drives - many machines
only have a single physical drive in them. Always best to distribute the
workload. (Dual-Core CPUs, Dual-Channel RAM....) I would rather
have three 200-Gigabyte drives than a single 750 or greater.