I bought a cheap laptop to save money about a year ago (it was all I could afford). I am tired of the long wait times for booting and program startup compared to all my other much faster XP machines.

The CPU is faster than my very old desktop but the desktop is much faster. The hard drive light on the laptop is on quite a lot. That leads me to two thoughts: Either I have a slow disk drive (only half full and no fragmentation or error problems) or I don't have enough memory for what I do (512 Meg).

I have no intention of replacing the disk drive. But the memory... Before blowing $150 on a Gig of RAM that may or may not help (practically not theoretically!), I'd like to know if that's the problem. I do have the task manager to look at but only a crude understanding of what I am seeing when it comes to memory. What is good, what is a problem? The numbers alone don't help me.

Any ideas?

What is the laptop? What processor? What 'rated' speed?

Many of the laptops have "management" software running to save battery power. They have excessive virtual drive space allocated which consumes memory. They may turn the hard drive on and off which can slow down certain operations. If you are using it with a power adapter turn off all that crap and see how it does.

Try one application at once. I don't have a notebook/laptop that is fast enough to let me be a 'real' power user. I stick to one thing at a time when using mine.

I'd optimize before adding on too much. Though more memory with XP fixes a multitude of problems all by itself usually.

Good luck and I'll point you in the right direction if I can depending on machine, processor/speed.

You won't find it in task manager, what you want to look for is pages per second in the performance monitor.
That's a measure of how often the system can't find what it's looking for in memory and goes to disk.
A high number of page faults/second indicates you don't have enough cache memory in your computer for the programs you're running. That's normal, and page faults are usually resolved in microseconds.
But what really matters is pages/second because that's how often it has to read the disk to find the swapped-out virtual memory. That means waiting for the disk to spin and that takes ages - whole milliseconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault

From Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Performance.
Run that performance monitor and then click on the + toolbar button to add a counter.
Choose Memory in the Performance Object dropdown and then Pages/sec in the Select counters from list
Do the same for Page Fault/sec

When my system is doing nothing, the page fault/sec count is around 20, and peaks up to 90 every minute or so.
That's just normal noise from the system running different programs, not bad because the pages/sec count is Zero ... that's a good thing.

Now when I burn a DVD, page faults/sec will Max out at over 2700 !!
That's because it does a lot of disk reading, through the memory buffer in Nero and the "Ultra Buffer" feature wants to use lots and lots of memory. I have a Gig of RAM too, so it's not shortage of memory.

What matters more is the level in normal operation, usually if you're running one program pages/sec above 50 indicates a bottleneck.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sag_mpmonperf_28.mspx?mfr=true


All Microsoft's advice is for normal programs, image manipulation is something else...
When loading a 14Meg jpeg file, I'll often see pages/sec 1700 and page faults/sec 10000 but that's because the system is really stressed handling large files like that !
Immediately after loading the image, all the counters go to sensible values :)


But your slow booting seems more like disk, or processor. Quite often on a laptop the system will slow down the processor to save battery, or in extreme circumstances for temperaure management.

Have you looked at options to control the CPU speed?
Maybe even when it's on mains power it doesn't change to maximum speed ...

You won't find it in task manager, what you want to look for is pages per second in the performance monitor.
That's a measure of how often the system can't find what it's looking for in memory and goes to disk.
A high number of page faults/second indicates you don't have enough cache memory in your computer for the programs you're running. That's normal, and page faults are usually resolved in microseconds.
But what really matters is pages/second because that's how often it has to read the disk to find the swapped-out virtual memory. That means waiting for the disk to spin and that takes ages - whole milliseconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault

From Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Performance.
Run that performance monitor and then click on the + toolbar button to add a counter.
Choose Memory in the Performance Object dropdown and then Pages/sec in the Select counters from list
Do the same for Page Fault/sec

When my system is doing nothing, the page fault/sec count is around 20, and peaks up to 90 every minute or so.
That's just normal noise from the system running different programs, not bad because the pages/sec count is Zero ... that's a good thing.

Now when I burn a DVD, page faults/sec will Max out at over 2700 !!
That's because it does a lot of disk reading, through the memory buffer in Nero and the "Ultra Buffer" feature wants to use lots and lots of memory. I have a Gig of RAM too, so it's not shortage of memory.

What matters more is the level in normal operation, usually if you're running one program pages/sec above 50 indicates a bottleneck.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sag_mpmonperf_28.mspx?mfr=true


All Microsoft's advice is for normal programs, image manipulation is something else...
When loading a 14Meg jpeg file, I'll often see pages/sec 1700 and page faults/sec 10000 but that's because the system is really stressed handling large files like that !
Immediately after loading the image, all the counters go to sensible values :)


But your slow booting seems more like disk, or processor. Quite often on a laptop the system will slow down the processor to save battery, or in extreme circumstances for temperaure management.

Have you looked at options to control the CPU speed?
Maybe even when it's on mains power it doesn't change to maximum speed ...

I am very surprised I never saw that performance monitor, that gave me the information I needed. The disk activity, pages/sec, is pretty much zero until I load an application. It returns to zero very quickly. The same thing happens when loading multiple apps at the same time. While running 4-5 apps, the pages/sec is very low and the apps work very well once they load.

So, I'm guessing its a slow disk drive. The laptop CPU is faster than other XP machines are not slow. I guess I'll make due with this one and save my pennies!

Thanks y'all.

Laptop hard drives tend to run at 5400 rpm where most desktop drives run at 7200 rpm. That will make a big difference. Any computer will only be as fast as it's slowest component. Hard drives and CD/DVD drives being the only things with moving parts can be the culprits that limit performance.

Is the excess hd activity only when it boots or does it seem to be all of the time. Anti-virus software can sometimes run in the backgroung and cause things to slow down.

The booting is extremely slow, sometimes it takes 5-7 minutes before the disk drive stops running and I can actually do something. I am surprised because all the other XP machines boot and are ready to go very quickly, less than a minute. Other apps, such as Firefox take a while on the first load, much faster if I load it again later. MS Office apps load pretty quickly most of the time, but MathCad, Opera, Thunderbird, iTunes, Adobe Reader, etc. have the same first-time very slow load.

I did think about the antivirus and have disabled it in the past to see. It made no visible difference on or off. The same with Zone Alarm and the background protein folding app. I am really beginning to believe its a slow disk drive.

You can see if it's the disk drive by looking at the queue length.
If there are queued I/O requests on the disk then you know it's not fast enough.

I have two 7200rpm 16M cache Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA drives
And still if I page through 14M CR2 files rapidly I get the disk queue growing.
I'm not paying out for 10000rpm or SCSI super drives - this is good enough.

Laptop hard drives tend to run at 5400 rpm where most desktop drives run at 7200 rpm. That will make a big difference. Any computer will only be as fast as it's slowest component. Hard drives and CD/DVD drives being the only things with moving parts can be the culprits that limit performance.

Actually, if you check the specs. you might be surprised to find some new laptop hard drvies running at only 4800 rpm. A large slow hard drive will certainly slow down any system. A lot of laptop CPUs are also still running at 1.4 ghz to 1.8 ghz. which is also slow, in comparison with many desktops.

I combined 1Gig ram with 3.0 ghz twin cpu and a 7,200 rpm hard drive as well as 17" cinematic wide screen, which is great for speed and quality wide screen video playback from DVD but very hard on batteries.

Ronnoco