Win2K PAINFULLY slow....

[StanG]

Here is my story:

My hardware: Duron 600@860, 256MB PC133 RAM (Mushkin), Abit KT7, Viper II VC, SB Live value, Cnet 10/100 NIC, Plextor 12x10x32 CDRW, 2 HDDs - 30GB Maxtor ATA100 7200rpm and 20GB Maxtor ATA100 5400rmp...
The 30GB hdd has 4 partitions and the 20GB has 2. The 30GB is installed as primary Master, and the 20GB is primary slave. On my other IDE controller, I have Plextor as secondary master and Zip driver as secondary slave.

I have been running Win98 for ~1 year, and it's been running fine (if you can say that about Win...). Recently, my PC became painfully slow - booting was taking couple minutes, applications ware very sluggish, etc...
Instead of formating, I decided to install Win2K in dual boot mode (clean install).
So I did that, and my PC is STILL very slow!!! Opening netscape 4.77 takes ~30 seconds!!!

WHY is that??? I have read that the partitioning makes the difference...
Is that true? Currently, win98 sits on "C" and Win2K on "D"... Since I don't have the partitions labeled (and I forgot what their sizes were ), I am guessing that Win2K is actually installed on the 20GB drive(???)

Thanks for any help

 

[ddiccico]

Is your drive badly fragmented. I'm not sure if a fragmented drive can slow your system down as much as you say, but it's worth a shot.

 

[StanG]

I did defragment the drives couple days ago, so that should not be a problem...

As a side note, in win98, the standard defrag program could not defragment any of my drives...
I have to use disk keeper...

 

[Psychoholic]

Are there any processes running that are chewing up processor cycles??? Check Task Manager.

 

[JERR]

What does the taskmanager for W2K tell you? Check the performance graph for cps/mem usage, then see if any processes are taking up your cpu cycles.

ps: Why so many partitions?

 

[StanG]

There are no processes that are hogging up CPU cycles...

Why so many partitions?
Well, good question
Originally, I had the 30GB HDD, and I wanted to keep win98 on 1st, planned on installing linux on 2nd, 3rd for mp3s and 4th for personal data...
Then, I bought the 20GB maxtor from staples, and just split it up in half - one half for ??? and the other for mp3s...
So there...

 

[Psychoholic]

So what's the percentage for the system idle process???

Are you using NTFS or FAT16/32???

 

[StanG]

about 98/99% and I am using Fat32...

If I don't get any help by tonight, win98 will be history

 

[kitkit201]

maybe it's ur partitions holding it up somehow?? ther'es no way that netscape takes that long to load up,.. esp with your new system.. it might be ur overclocking?? u might be doing it a bit too much. 250 +...

 

[JERR]

try running Windows checkdisk on next restart. I had a W2K system slow way down after forcing a shutdown from taskmanager because a quantum drive couldn't handle a massive file transfer.