Why so sluggish?

[SonjaHBT]

Ok, someone is going to hit me, I know this is a broad question, but its bugging me. My second system is a AMD K6-2 550mhz, SiS 530 integrated video card (with up to date drivers), a SMC EZ card 10/100 LAN card, an integrated sound card that I didnt bother to install (no speakers nor do I want them) and an onboard modem that I also dont need. But heres why Im really baffled of this slow performance, 320 megs of RAM! Now I had an Athlon 800 with 256 megs RAM and it was running pretty damn fast (TONS better than this) but why with more does this machine run so sluggish? When I switch from lets say AOL, or Internet Explorer, mIRC, in the taskbar, thats usually sluggish. takes programs a while to maximize and load. The hard drive is about 4 gig I think, but its been clean formatted and I installed 2k, but still ran sluggish with the reformat. Im out of ideas, and if anyone has any suggestions that speed up this slow performance (that shouldnt be happening given the specs) I will appreciate it SO much.

[DANIMAL]

how many things are running in the back round
hit CRTL ALT DEL to see.

Try Downloading [url]www.pcaccelerator.com[\url]
Reduce the colors to 16 million rather than 32 million.
minmize your task bar to 4 things

PS. AOHell is not really nessesary is it.

[SonjaHBT]

Desktop is running at 16 million colors, I specifically do NOT allow more than about 3 things to run in the background (in fact now there are 2 small things (no norton antivirus resource hog here). Also , I usually only have aol, 2 instances of mirc, and 1 or 2 maybe internet explorer windows open at a time, 320 megs of ram shouldnt have a problem handling that.

[DANIMAL]

sent a post to the chat room maybe someone else can help

[scout970]

might i ask what mobo because most of the super 7's will only take 256 megs be it sdram or whatever i'd try removing a stick and dropping it back to 256 and see what happens also if not that then i'd try swapping ram around it sounds like either the first a ram limit or second a bad stick

[MacGyver]

Hey scout nice to see you again. Anyway, after following scout's suggestion, see if there are any BIOS updates for your particular board. May address the issue you're having.

[DANIMAL]

Originally posted by scout970:
<STRONG>might i ask what mobo because most of the super 7's will only take 256 megs be it sdram or whatever i'd try removing a stick and dropping it back to 256 and see what happens also if not that then i'd try swapping ram around it sounds like either the first a ram limit or second a bad stick</STRONG>

Sounds like Matsonic to me

[SonjaHBT]

ugh sandra crashes anytime I try the tests that would reveal the mobo name/model. So not totally sure...althouh about your idea with the RAM, I was also thinking, some of the ram (there are two 128mg sticks and one 64meg stick) might be PC100 and some PC133, would this cause problems mixing them, problems of slowdown like this? Also, if the mobo only allows a max of lets say 256 megs RAM, would that do this type of thing? Thanks again!

[scout970]

yes i've seen these symptoms before i'd remove the 64 first and see if it makes a differance as to the mixing of 133 and 100 sometimes but not normaly also with sandra crashing that also points to ram limit exceeded or bad ram

[Wildman6971]

just for the sake of argument uninstall and take out the net card and see what happens.
I like the smc's but have seen many a strange problem related to them....

[SonjaHBT]

hmm, I remember when I had that SMC card in my main PC it caused a ton of slowdown too...wonder if that has something to do with it.

[BVD]

Sonja,
In general, when this happens to me with a machine, I strip it down to video card, fresh
Windows install, and NO other drivers or software. This basically eliminates a lot of
wondering.
More specifically, it does seem to be a
ram issue most of the time. Once a customer
had a 32mb DIMM and a 64mb DIMM installed
but it was very sluggish like yours. (no error messages) When I pulled out the 64mb
(not the 32mb) the machine ran like a race horse. Another time a customers machine ran
wonderfully in my shop but VERY slow at his house. Turned out he was plugged into a Radio
Shack power strip. When he plugged directly
into the wall it was fine.
Just some ideas.
Bill.

[Fierce]

Just a thought, but how full is the 4 gig hard drive?? Also, what is your virtual memory set to with all your ram installed? And lastly, how long has it been running this way and when have you last defragged the machine? My quick thoughts. <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

[CampbellD]

Hi All,

One thing with Windows2000 is that you need to nave the latest BIOS running on your M/Board. This is due to power management and the like which is a real sticker with windows 2000.

If the power management on the board is not quite 2000 compliant you may get slow do.

IO and memory access would be the first to suffer as well as disk speed and transfers.

Check your BIOS revision and download and apply the latest update to see if that makes a difference.

All PC when 2000 came out that were Windows2000 Compliant need a BIOS Update.

[SonjaHBT]

Hmm thats the problem, finding out what kind of motherboard I have..how can I check my BIOS revision? When I go to check sandra for mobo information it crashes =\ Thanks again everyone for your tips