XP Performance Optimization

[Guest]

I have XP running on a Pentium II with a 10 GB c: drive, and have a backup
40GB f: drive with plenty of space. The c: is also formatted as fat32 and the
f: is ntfs. I want to optimize performance by making the f: drive my boot
drive and running xp from there. Any suggestions about optimizing performace
with 50 GB, Pentium II and XP?

Thanks-

Brian

 

[Maincat]

I have XP running on a Pentium II with a 10 GB c: drive, and have a backup
40GB f: drive with plenty of space. The c: is also formatted as fat32 and
the
f: is ntfs. I want to optimize performance by making the f: drive my boot
drive and running xp from there. Any suggestions about optimizing
performace
with 50 GB, Pentium II and XP?

Thanks-

Brian

You won't necessarily get better performance by using the larger drive as
the boot drive.
First step - unless there is a huge reason to keep FAT32, convert that drive
to NTFS via the Drive Management MMC or a command line convert c: /fs:ntfs.
How much RAM do you have?

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

You won't necessarily get better performance by using the larger
drive as the boot drive.

I agree. If there's any difference at all, I would expect it be small.

First step - unless there is a huge reason to keep FAT32, convert
that drive to NTFS via the Drive Management MMC or a command line
convert c: /fs:ntfs.

Hoever Brian, should be careful before he does this. Simply doing as you
suggest can *hurt* performance, because he would very likely end up with
512-byte clusters instead of the default 4K NTFS clusters. He should first
read
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfscvt.htm to find out how to avoid this problem.

Also note that conversion is a big step, affecting everything on your drive.
When you take such a big step, no matter how unlikely, it is always possible
that something could go wrong. For that reason, it's prudent to make sure
you have a backup of anything you can't afford to lose before beginning.