UUUGGG, slow lappy

[Rogeee]

My SO was kind enough to give me a Dell 8200 the other day, here are the specs ;
1.6 Mobile with speed step
500 Ram
30G Hitachi HD
15.1 TFT
DVD in the non mobile port
CD rom or floppy in the other port
Built in LAn and modem

Now when I recieved it it had XP Pro on it (under her name), the OS was damaged causing repeated errors and it was constantly trying to revert back to an older date in the system restore calender.

So I decided to wipe the HD clean and install a fresh XP home, now before the new OS install, the Lappy performed OK in the speed department, not as fast as my POS 2.0 Celery but not bad, after the fresh install of XP home the machine is now creeping, I mean SLOW, real slow, slower than my old Dell PIII 600 with half the ram, I searched around looking for a cause but could not find anything.

The bus is running in DMA, the speed step is shut off, memory usage is hanging around 200 megs yet when I open any up it takes up to 30 seconds for the window to pop open, getting on the web is insane, I have cable yet it takes over a minute to load the forums, does anyone have any idea what the hell is going on ?


Edit ;
Forgot to mention that boot up times are normal

 

[fbrdphreak]

Did you load all the drivers, particularly chipset? Go to Dell's website and DL/install all latest drivers available for it.

You reformatted, otherwise that was my next guess; disk fragmentation.

It should be fairly quick with 512MB; I service old Latitude's with the same chip and 512MB RAM and XP is pretty smooth.

 

[Rogeee]

Thanks for the tip, I just installed the INF drivers from Dell's website to no avail

It's very strange, it boots fast, no problem there, I went into the BIOS and checked all the settings and everything looks good, so just for sh!ts and grins I set everything to max with no effect at all.
I downloaded Sisoft Sandra and ran the tests and it falls right into the range of other cpmparable systems.
I am coming to the conclusion that maybe XP did not install correctly for some ungodly known reason.

 

[pkme2]

If one does a reformat and clean o/s install (no Dell Windows Reinstall disk), one must have the Dell drivers disk, or as suggested the Dell site drivers. If all that is done, then, Windows updates, then video drivers, bios update, and if the lappy still doesn't perform, its a bust.
Do it over. I prefer Win XP Pro SP2 to start with because of Win XP Home's failings, but its your choice. 512MB RAM is minimum and that should get you started. Would be still interested in what the problem maybe if you solve the mystery.

 

[Rogeee]

Man this is frustrating the hell out of me, last night I wanted to reinstall XP, so I booted from the CD and tried to make two partitions, one a 28G, the second a two gigger, unfortunately it will now not give me an option to make two partitions, it will only allow me one partition, so I went to go download the IBM disk Mangler utility but ti is no longer available :|.

I went to Ranish and downloaded their disk utility, same fffing thing, there is no option to partition the hard drive, WTF ?
Is my hard drive boned ?

 

[Cerb]

Ranish? Uh...just use a Linux distro with a decent installer, like Mandrake or Debian, and remove the disk after the partitioning is done. Use the Windows install CD to do the formatting of the partition you want to install to.

You could also run cfdisk from a live CD, such as Knoppix.

If you're not using seriously legacy OSes, you should not need anything special for partitioning, formatting, or booting (save that you want to use MS software to format NTFS).

 

[Rogeee]

Well after all the debugging I ended up reinstalling XP, after the fresh install (for the second time) the lappy runs fine now, go figure