Re-send of message 'Win2000 booting and running slow'

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sherwin Dubren
  • Start date Start date
S

Sherwin Dubren

I originally sent this message off early Wednesday morning at about
1:15 a.m., but I did not see it posted. Here is what I sent:

Admittedly, I am trying to push my old system by running Windows 2000
on it. It has a pentium 166 MHz cpu and 96 Meg of ram. Things I have
already checked are: cleaning internet cache and cookies, defragging
disk drives, turning Norton Anti-Virus off/on, and playing with the swap
size areas of the various logical drives. Nothing helps. I am not
running
any big jobs in background, and don't see any cpu hogs from task manager
after it finally boots. It loads programs slowly, as well. Am I
missing
something. It seems like at one time, the system was running faster.
I suspect the wrong size swap areas. I also have my system loaded on
logical drive 'H' instead of 'C'(hasn't enough room for system stuff).
Also, I have two disc drives with 'H' on the second drive. If the
second drive is not the 'master' drive, could this be the problem?

Sherwin Dubren
 
Sherwin Dubren said:
I originally sent this message off early Wednesday morning at about
1:15 a.m., but I did not see it posted. Here is what I sent:

Admittedly, I am trying to push my old system by running Windows 2000
on it. It has a pentium 166 MHz cpu and 96 Meg of ram. Things I have
already checked are: cleaning internet cache and cookies, defragging
disk drives, turning Norton Anti-Virus off/on, and playing with the swap
size areas of the various logical drives. Nothing helps. I am not
running
any big jobs in background, and don't see any cpu hogs from task manager
after it finally boots. It loads programs slowly, as well. Am I
missing
something. It seems like at one time, the system was running faster.
I suspect the wrong size swap areas. I also have my system loaded on
logical drive 'H' instead of 'C'(hasn't enough room for system stuff).
Also, I have two disc drives with 'H' on the second drive. If the
second drive is not the 'master' drive, could this be the problem?

Sherwin Dubren
Click to expand...

Your first post is clearly visible in this newsgroup, and it drew
two replies (none of which are from me):
==============================
96MB of RAM? Surely you jest? I have a 433MHz machine which I thought was
quite slow until I added an additional 512RAM so that it now has 768MB. Now
it's quite the screamer. I don't know if it's cost efficient for you to
upgrade a 133MHz machine but I would bring the RAM up to at least 512MB if
that's the route you want to take. Also, what's the RPM of your hard disk.
I replaced my slow hard disk with a much faster hard disk and got quite the
performance boost there too. If you do buy new memory, the memory *may* be
compatible with a new computer so there's no loss.

Uncle Josef
--
Take the "NiceGuy" out of (e-mail address removed) to respond
==============================
is this server or pro? the min req for pro are 166 mhz and 64 megs of ram ,
with 128 suggested, those are the minimums. so if you use the minimums you
get the minimum. if its server i'm supprised it did the install, by a new
mobo. if it's server, shut down all non essential services, ie: dhcp, dns,
etc. that will help
==============================
 
Sherwin said:
I originally sent this message off early Wednesday morning at about
1:15 a.m., but I did not see it posted. Here is what I sent:
Click to expand...

There are a couple of replies to your original post, but let's see what we
can do to make Windows 2000 more palatable on your 166 Mhz machine.
I suspect the wrong size swap areas. I also have my system loaded on
logical drive 'H' instead of 'C'(hasn't enough room for system stuff).
Also, I have two disc drives with 'H' on the second drive. If the
second drive is not the 'master' drive, could this be the problem?
Click to expand...

You say you have a "logical" drive H on a second hard drive slaved off the
first. If you have two IDE channels on your motherboard, I suggest moving
the slaved drive to the secondary IDE channel and slaving the CD-ROM drive
off one of the hard drives.

However, this is probably not the cause of your "slowness". Did you
recently increase your display resolution to 1024 x 768? If so, crank it
back down to 800 x 600. Also, while you're messing with your display
settings, use as few colors as possible. Stay away from True 32 bit Color
settings, use High 16 Bit Color or even 256 colors if you can tolerate that.

Another thing is to make sure all the check boxes under the "Effects" tab of
the Display Properties are unchecked, except for the last one about keyboard
navigation. Under the "Web" tab, uncheck the "Show Web blah blah" box.

Screen Saver... None. Background, you guessed it... None.

Open up My Computer and open the Folder Options dialog from the Tools menu.
Use Windows Classic under Active Desktop and Web View.

Let me know if any of this helps at all, then we can start going through the
services. We want you using no more than 60MB of RAM after bootup.

- carl
 
Thanks for the replies. I must have a 'message-swallower' at work here,
because I searched for the orignal message and couldn't find it.

I have the Windows 2000 Pro. I expect it to be slow, but when it takes
over 5 minutes to boot, something has to be wrong. Once it is up and
running, it is somewhat more responsive. Nothing like my ASUS 1.3 Gig
machine, which probably makes the slowness more apparent.

Sherwin D.
 
Carl Fenley said:
There are a couple of replies to your original post, but let's see what we
can do to make Windows 2000 more palatable on your 166 Mhz machine.


You say you have a "logical" drive H on a second hard drive slaved off the
first. If you have two IDE channels on your motherboard, I suggest moving
the slaved drive to the secondary IDE channel and slaving the CD-ROM drive
off one of the hard drives.

However, this is probably not the cause of your "slowness". Did you
recently increase your display resolution to 1024 x 768? If so, crank it
back down to 800 x 600. Also, while you're messing with your display
settings, use as few colors as possible. Stay away from True 32 bit Color
settings, use High 16 Bit Color or even 256 colors if you can tolerate that.

Another thing is to make sure all the check boxes under the "Effects" tab of
the Display Properties are unchecked, except for the last one about keyboard
navigation. Under the "Web" tab, uncheck the "Show Web blah blah" box.

Screen Saver... None. Background, you guessed it... None.

Open up My Computer and open the Folder Options dialog from the Tools menu.
Use Windows Classic under Active Desktop and Web View.

Let me know if any of this helps at all, then we can start going through the
services. We want you using no more than 60MB of RAM after bootup.

- carl
Click to expand...

These sounds like the setting one would make to XP, not to W2K.

Uncle Josef
 
We have 700 MHz machines with 256 meg that take on the order of 2-3
minutes to get to the login prompt. I am hardly surprised at 5 minutes
for the hardware you describe.(I think you may even be understating the
time). HD speed will also play a factor. Minimum requirements are what
it takes to load the operating system, NOT whats needed for aceptable
performance(which is very subjective) Want more perfomance? Buy faster
hardware.
 
Josef said:
These sounds like the setting one would make to XP, not to W2K.
Click to expand...

I've never messed with Windows XP, but will be installing XP Professional
and Small Business Server 2003 today on a test LAN. I just have two Windows
2000 Pro, one Windows 98, and one Windows 95 computer at home.

- carl
 
Carl,
I followed your directions. Most of my settings were already at the
values you suggested, except for the 'effects' tab where I had to turn
of a few options. I have not noticed an appreciable speed up of things
after doing your changes. It seems like the disk is working very hard
to load programs. My second drive containing the 'H' logical drive is
a relatively new drive (Maxtor 90576D4). Logical disk 'H' is a bit
tight
for storage, having only 124 MB out of 1.34 GB free.

Sherwin
 
Sherwin said:
Carl,
I followed your directions. Most of my settings were already at the
values you suggested, except for the 'effects' tab where I had to turn
of a few options. I have not noticed an appreciable speed up of
things after doing your changes. It seems like the disk is working
very hard to load programs. My second drive containing the 'H'
logical drive is a relatively new drive (Maxtor 90576D4). Logical
disk 'H' is a bit tight
for storage, having only 124 MB out of 1.34 GB free.
Click to expand...

Ok, a few more questions...

Which drive holds your swap drive and what is the initial, maximum, and
currently allocated size of your swap drive? How much Free space is
available on that drive?

- carl
 
I hope I am not duplicating my replies, but I am having trouble seeing
them on this newsgroup. I will try again to resend this:

Carl,
I followed your directions. Most of my settings were already at the
values you suggested, except for the 'effects' tab where I had to turn
of a few options. I have not noticed an appreciable speed up of things
after doing your changes. It seems like the disk is working very hard
to load programs. My second drive containing the 'H' logical drive is
a relatively new drive (Maxtor 90576D4). Logical disk 'H' is a bit
tight
for storage, having only 124 MB out of 1.34 GB free.

Sherwin
 
Sherwin said:
I hope I am not duplicating my replies, but I am having trouble seeing
them on this newsgroup. I will try again to resend this:

Carl,
I followed your directions. Most of my settings were already at the
values you suggested, except for the 'effects' tab where I had to turn
of a few options. I have not noticed an appreciable speed up of
things after doing your changes. It seems like the disk is working
very hard to load programs. My second drive containing the 'H'
logical drive is a relatively new drive (Maxtor 90576D4). Logical
disk 'H' is a bit tight
for storage, having only 124 MB out of 1.34 GB free.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I responded to that last response. Here it is again:

Which drive holds your swap drive and what is the initial, maximum, and
currently allocated size of your swap drive? How much Free space is
available on that drive?

- carl
 
Hi Carl,
To answer your questions:

My swap area is spread over two disk drives, as follows -

C: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 591 MB avail. Drive 0
(Primary Partition)
D: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 150 MB avail. Drive 0
E: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 369 MB avail. Drive 0

F: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1440 MB avail. Drive 1
G: 200 MB initial, 200 MB max, 1828 MB avail. Drive 1
H: 150 MB initial, 150 MB max, 269 MB avail. Drive 1
(System logical drive)

total swap area allocated for all drives - 1100 MB
Drive 0 is 1.56 GB
Drive 1 is 5.35 GB

Sherwin
 
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