Performance/memory usage in Win ME

[dan325it]

I've been ripping/encoding a bunch of CDs to MP3 lately and have been disappointed by my computer's performance. I have a CUSL2 with 1 GHz processor and it takes a long time for each CD, especially the encoding part which is mostly CPU. I'm using Exact Audio Copy with the latest Lame encoder plug-in. Encoding an average song takes 1.5 to 2 minutes. One time when I was uploading (USB modem) some photos to ofoto.com, the encode time per song went up to 12-15 minutes!

Anyway I was using the Norton Systemworks tools to look at how my machine is operating and it showed that my entire 256 MB of RAM was being used, plus a pretty large swap file was 70% used. Could this be right (this was with EAC/Lame running)?

I'm using onboard video which is probably a major part of the performance problem I'm seeing. Anything else I should check for? I just recently put this machine together, so it's possible that I've got some bugs to work out.

Also, anyone have any suggestions for a freeware benchmark program? I checked zdnet and didn't find anything except video benchmarks.

TIA,
Dan

 

[SocrPlyr]

try using a different program... becuz it doesn't take me nearly that long to encode... see my rig if you want... also what bitrate are you encoding? do you always have stuff like norton system works runnin in the background (basically i would dump the whole pos prog)?
it has nothing really to do w/ ur ram... that should be plenty including the fact that the average song on a cd is about 40MB... also are you running a virus scanner? (if so try disabling it and see what happens)

just idea and questions

Josh