Excessive Paging to hard disk...

I have an AMD K6-2 350, asus P5A-B motherboard, 96 meg of ram... 2 udma 4 gig drives (on WD and the other Seagate) a hp9100 cdburner, and a 32x cdrom... ok... Now my problem is, after installing windows 98SE (happens in any version of windows) The system seems to page to the hard disk alot, and games take like 20 seconds to load... it pages.. then pauses for 15 seconds, then finally starts to load... the first thing I thought was a virus, but after formatting and reinstalling 98 I found that was not the case. Also I have updated my bios, and installed the latest bus mastering drivers... I'm at the end of my rope here.. has anyone else seen this? (also DMA is checked on my drives in the device manager)

You've got too much stuff loading on startup, and free physical RAM is gone, thus windows uses the swap file on the HD for everything.
Read this article and see if it clears up some stuff.

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members.cnx.net/reboot

I've already used msconfig to disable everything but systray and explorer.. forgot that

Several things I would try. First defrag regularly.

Next setup a fixed length swapfile on the hard drive that has less stuff on it. I was amazed at the improvement I got when I did that.

This prevents windwows from constantly re-sizing the swapfile and also if it is on a different drive preferably on a different IDE channel windows can access it and another drive at the same time.

Also, try setting the virtual memory to use the second drive. It will help your machine run faster too.

Ok, in trying all these settings I realize now that it's not really paging all this time, it's accessing the drive... In fact, It pages very little... SO... Could the bottleneck be hardware? I know the drive is UDMA and the MB supports it... Do I need a special cable for that, or would it help to use an eide cable? or maybe I should just get a new drive?

helllllloooo!!! ok TECH-O'S, lets remember
w98 se rule no# 1 it SUCKS BIGTIME! ITS WORSE THAN THE FIRST RELEASE OF 95! I HAVE
200 PCS I SUPPORT, THEY RUN LIKE CLOCKS ON
95 OR 98, YOU STICK SEC ED ONTO THEM AND ITS
ONE MELTDOWN AFTER THE OTHER, DONT USE IT!
_____NEXT... YOU NEED TO GO TO
START>PROGRAMS>ASSESSORIES>SYSTEM-TOOLS>
SYSTEM INFORMATION>STARTUP
!!!THERE U WILL FIND LITTLE BOXES, UNCHECK ALL THE ONES U DONT NEED,WHICH WILL BE MOST OF THEM, AND REBOOT! VIOLA! YOU SHOULD NOT
HAVE THIS PROBLEM ANYMORE, OH AND IF U USE AN
INTELLIMOUSE WITH EYE, DO NOT INSTALL THE
SOFTWARE FOR IT,JUST USE IT PLAIN, OR YOU DONT EVEN WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT WILL DO...

Okay Spooky*, I went all the way to system information and can't find the Start-up tab, whatever you mentioned. Suggesions please.

Dennis

I have a P200 doing the same thing???
and I took everything out of startup that I could, it doesn't happen all the time but often and it actually ties up so many resources that what you type comes out lile 10 secs after you type it...also seems to happen more online.
It was upgraded to win98, not clean install(its my Aunt's) I have tried ssetting swap, everything I can think of, every time I think its gone it shows up again ..have run scandisk, defrag, NU and virus scan, just to see ...no problems really...tried diff ram. Am just about to reformat if I can't fix it, but she is one of those people scatters all her "important" files all over so was afraid to do it before...but about to give up. You can hear drive run, run, run when it shouldn't need to, like not enough virtual memory but that is not the reason.
Oh and by the way, I have had much less trouble with pcs I used to have to fix every other month since installing 98 or 98SE so I think they are much more forgiving in the long run than 95 ever was.


[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited April 21, 2000).]

Well, I solved it....

I replaced my main HDD with my secondary drive which is ATA66 and slapped a ATA66 cable in my box... transfered the contents of my drive... (NEVER EVER USE "Sea Tools" FROM SEAGATE!)And it runs like a champ now...except for the sea tools thing... everything seems to be kosher. If yer wondering sea tools did not transfer everything over correctly... especially stuff with long file names...




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<->TechWulf<->

-My, that was a stroke of adaquacy!