improving desktop "feedback" performance

[getoverclocked]

Hello All,
I'm trying to improve my desktop performance. Here are the things I find "slow" and was wondering if people could suggest things to buy to speed them up:

-2D video: I don't play many games anymore but do a lot of VCD watching. I like being able to open up a video or tv and move it around quickly without it breaking up. I noticed I could this at the mac store. I played two dvds beside each other and jiggled one of them around and it kept the video intact well but doesn't do that well on my computer. video looks fine statically but I can't play two and move it around quickly. I have an ATI AIW Radeon (first generation) with 32meg DDR. Seems 2D or mpeg performance doesn't change much with new cards. Macs have that Quartz Extreme that converts everything to opengl. Is MS planning anything like that or is something like that available on Linux?

-harddrive lag: it seems that if I'm copying large files across my HD, it really slows down my system. I have 4 120 gig WD 7200 rpm ide drives. I check the cpu usage in Task Monitor on Winxp and it doesn't increase that much but my system really goes to a crawl and I'm not sure why. I have 1 GB of memory. Is this due to the windows swapfile settings or is it just the way IDE is built?

-internet/network lag: I use both Opera and IE5. I've noticed that my computer almost freezes sometimes when accessing certain pages. It's really quite weird, you can't hit the minimize button or close button and the application just turns white until something kicks in and it keeps going. Anyone notice this too? I have full 100mbps LAN line and my pings to www.yahoo.com and www.google.com are about 3 milliseconds and no more than 100 ms to any big site. Is windows trying to access something that hangs my network card at times or something?

It seems I do a lot of multitasking. Will an Intel P4 with HT help me over my 2.2Ghz P4 now? I jumped on the dual Celeron bandwagon way back when but it didn't seem to do much for me. I had this idea that the operating system would be much more responsive since I had a dedicated cpu doing something else but this was not the case. Has things changed now with XP?

Thanks for all the help.

 

[0roo0roo]

u have ddr memory? ddr is snappier

i doubt the mac was playing two dvds, more like two quick time trailer files, lower resolution etc. new video cards do have better video acceleration, your radeon is dog old. i used to have one too

ide is suxors. communicating to both drives on one cable at the same time will slow things to a crawl. only copying from one drive cable to a drive on a separate cable will have any decent speed. solution is scsi but expensive. dma mode helps too.

ie 5 is old and buggy, why are u still using it. i'm using 6.0.2800 and thats probably noteven the latest one out. update. opera is buggy, it does like to freeze, i rarely use opera.

are you using xp sp1 with all updates? if not, u should. theres no point goign with an earlier os, esp win9x based which are turds.