why is XP and other apps so slow?

[imported_KClark]

I built a new system at Christmas. A64 X2 3800+; 2 gig RAM; Abit KN8 Ultra. After using a PIII system with Me for the last 5 years I was really looking forward to some snappy response in Explorer and apps. I was pretty disappointed to find out that things weren't nearly as fast as I had hoped.

Specifically, when I'm in Explorer looking at digital photos it takes forever for thumbnails to load when I open a folder. By forever I mean 60+ seconds to open a folder containing 30 picture files. The same thing happens in Photoshop Elements when I chose File Open.

I had decided that I just had expected too much until last week when I was at my brother-in-laws house. He opened a picture folder on his computer and it was almost instantaneous, about 2 seconds for a folder with more than 25 files.

Can anyone help me out with this? Are there any benchmarks I can run to verify how fast my system is really running? I've monitored CPU usage in task manager when doing these operations and it hits 50-60%, is this normal?

Also, when I look at system properties it shows my correct CPU and memory but it consistently says 1.00 GHz. Is this Cool n Quiet throttling down my CPU? But I never see the clock go above that no matter what I'm doing.

Thanks for any help or direction.

 

[lxskllr]

One thing you can check is to see if your hard drives are in udma mode, sometimes they can get set to pio and that slows down things a good bit. Open up device manager, expand IDE ATA\ATAPI controllers, select properties on primary and secondary IDE channels, select advanced and make sure transfer mode is set to dma if available. I think you may need to reboot if you change it from pio mode.

 

[HybridSquirrel]

well your hyper transport is at 1ghz (1000mhz) maybe its reading that?