That's it, I don't like computers anymore!

It's those evil P4's. Yuck!

Have you checked for a bios update?

i personally would blame circus midgets, grab a beverage, and try and drink the bad memories of this "computer" that you speak of away

oh, and make sure you're using an ata100 cable (cableselect is a BAD THING) and see if there's a bios update like griffinme said

make sure they didn't stick a CD-ROM on the same channel as your hard drive... That'd slow it down real good...

That's what you get with Ultra ATA 100... Computers are evil!!

There's a thought... maybe you have an ATA card that needs a driver installed before the OS goes on...

Stop complaining Froggy! If you were using MY computer then you would have something to complain about. 233Mhz PII, 3Gb Hard drive, (Yes! Three Gigabytes) and a 14" monitor. The fan is held on to the chip with tape, becuse the clips broke with the heat, the monitor is hanging on to life by a thread and pulls circular images into ovals no matter what adjustments I make. I have 100Mb of space left on my drive, so every time I make an image in Photoshop I have to save it as a .jpg and delete the .psd file!! And now that I have XP, you can imagine how slow it all runs, as it just can't cope. I think I shall go back to Windows95 and just make Quicknotes skins!!
Oh, and my scanner and printer are now lumps of useless plastic due to incompatibility issues with XP. And my modem runs at 31.2Kbs, which means every page on WinCustomize takes around 3 minutes to load.
No, your system sounds just fine to me.

My computer's good points:
1. 320Mb Ram.
2. er, there is no "2".

Damn BoXXi... I thought I had it bad

here's a word that scares people celeron

You stole my computer Boxxi!

PII 233
160Mb ram
4gig hard drive
Matrox mystique video card
A 56k modem that will only connect to my ISP at 33k
It does have a nice 17 inch trinitron monitor.

It is the "second" computer. Although the "first" computer is not much better.

This is mine: nothing special, but it does the job (for now):

800Mhz Celeron
192Mb RAM (was 64, but I upgraded!!)
20Gb HDD (yuk!)
Windows XP (YEAHHHH!)
Integrated graphics with "dynamically shared memory" - In other words, it nicks my system ram!!! AHHHHHH!! Allergic reaction to games!!!! EEWWW!

Here's the link the the benchmark program I used.

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10102-100-7820342.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-2.7820342

Brad, I tried the test on my box - PII_450Mhz - 60G Maxtor HD ATA66 and I got this:

seq. read: 23.4
seq. write: 14.0
Random Seek: 3.4
Disk Mark: 107.8

was your result just the random seek test? This machine I'm using is not what you'd consider "fast" but I don't notice slow memory paging or any hard drive related sluggishness. When I installed Win2k on this machine I had to load an ATA Card driver prior to the OS or it wouldn't run right.

Well you saw what I get on seq read: 3.5.

You using FAT or NTFS?

NTFS

erm..
my laptop
pentium with win 95....and 64mb of ram.....

not so long ago Elfkura, that would have been considered a rocket. It's funny how as the speeds advance, the programs get more bloated and use-up all that speed.

DavidK,

oh so true. Don't you wish they'll quit putting in bloated programs idiots use? Sometimes my laptop makes me feel stupid =/

My three week old box:

Athlon XP 1600+ (1400mhz)
512 SDram
GeForce3 TI200 w/64 DDR Whopass pixelpusher!!!!
Onboard sound ()
Windows XP

Quite an upgrade from my two year "old" 400 mhz/256/Geforce2/Win2K!!

Here's where I'm at:

On various disk benchmarks I get around 3 to 5 Megs per second (depending on the benchmark) on this machine. Luckily, there are lots of machines in the test lab to compare to and they all get normal amounts (14 to 22 megs/sec depending on various circumstnaces).

The C drive has 512 byte clusters which is bad but there is no way to fix that because I can't convert to FAT32 because files are compressed and some of them are in use (and you can't run compact in the emergency command console thingy). So that's a minor part of the problem but not the major part.

My other partition, also NTFS, also gets a terrible score (3 to 5) and it has the standard 4K cluster size.

I've put in a couple of different drives and a different controller and one drive with FAT32 managed to get all the way up to a 6. Still a far cry from the 20 to 25 it should be getting.

I've updated the bios to the latest (new as of this month even). Updated the motherboard chipset (Intel 860) to the latest version. Double checked to make sure the features on the drive and such are all set up.

I even switched to a single processor kernal (disabled one of my CPUs) and that made no difference either.

So I'm sitting here with my fast Dell Precision 530 workstation that is fast in every way except that the hard drive performance is very slow.

The only thing I haven't tried is putting on a SCSI drive instead to see if that helps. It's so frustrating because things like IE take 3 seconds to load (only 1 second at home) and even checking email there is a noticeable pause when clicking on an email to read.

I'm surpised I"m not the only one running into this kind of problem. It seems like it must be some sort of XP issue where some driver features are disabled (like caching or something or that it's really in PIO or SOMETHIGN strange anyway).

I'm stumped. Please remember, I started doing the benchmark precisely because I noticed the performance problem first. It does feel far too slow.

Brad....I'm sure that file compression is not going to help your speed issues....more likely the cause of them.
Years ago I used to use 'Freespace'...an 'on-the-fly' decompressor....but it still slowed access.
I'd expect NTFS to perform better than Fat32....and don't forget 'Defrag'....I'm an over-user of 'defrag'....

Hi, did you say you tried a controller card, something like a Promise controller card? And bypass the motherboards Pri. IDE channel altogether. I did this with my system just to make use of old hard drives I had, and WOW to my surprize got a very large, and noticeable increase in speed. The cost was only about $35.00. Windows98se thinks of it as a SCSI setup! that might bypass the XP issues.

Just an idea.

I have a Promise Ultra ATA 100 card, XP and NTFS and I am getting 21, 15, 3 on those tests. No compression though.

Hmm, this crap NT machine (ran with a stack of apps in use):

sequential read: 3.5
sequential write: 2.7
random seek: 1.5
disk mark 20.1

Seems awfully similar to your stats. Mind you, this is an old p350/NTFS though. Proves my prejudice that NTFS is overrated. I wonder how well my p75 will score...

Would seem Craeonics and Frogboy have the same problem. I wonder how similar their HW is.

Just interested Frogboy (as a long-standing dual CPU user) - which motherboard you have in that baby ?