Hi all,
I recently completely upgraded my system to:
P4 3ghz HT
2x512mb ddr400 Kingston RAM and 2x Crucial 512mb ddr400 RAM (Dual Channel Enabled)
80gb Western Digital IDE Hard Drive
128mb ATI Radeon 9800pro AGP
For this new setup my system should fly, but windows xp is quite slow loading up and just isnt as fast as i expected, could anyone help with what could be the problem? 
Thanks
What applications have you got installed?, i find that windows xp is never really fast.
only standard like ATI graphics drivers. its a new install of windows xp, also i have HL2, prey installed, but apart from that its all standard. my pagefile is set to 4000 max tho, could that be part of the problem? the problem is when i turn it on, i see the white line for loading before the windows xp logo comes up (my past machine didnt show that, it was a 2ghz athlon) and it stays on the windows xp loading screen for alot longer than my old machine did.
hmm when windows is first installed page file should be like 1500mb max for 1gb of ram, how slow exatly is it, why do you think it’s slow? what symptoms are you seeing?
I have a p4 3ghz with 512mb of ram and the same hd at work and windows loads practically instantly, with my home one it takes longer (showing the white windows loading bar and taking a while when its on the xp boot screen, mine has 3x the graphics and ram, it makes no sense..
What should i set my min and max page file to?
1500mb
in your specs it says 2gb of ram, do you mean pentium 4 3ghz with 512kb l2 catch?
as far as i know its a 2mb l2 catch
so you have 512mb of ram of 2gb? if its 512mb, thats abit low.
Try using 1gb of ram instead of 2gb. See if that makes a difference.
Ummm, 2gb is more than 1gb, i think 2gb will be better than 1.
so you both think its a ram problem?
I dont know what I think other than the consensus years ago was that more than 1gb of RAM will slow XP down. I accept that programs (ie games) will happily use up the extra RAM if it is there but I dont know about how windows treats it.
To be honest I dont use XP cos it is slow, I eneded up sticking to 2000 pro.
Try benchamrking your components against other peoples. (sisandra is the easy single option for this. Dont expect to be the same as the results in sandra but expect them to be close)
If everything is similar it must be windows being slow.
This computer im at now benchmarks great but is slow as hell, and uses XP. I just lumped it cos its the office computer and the worker likes XP over 2000 for some reason.
Oh, I should have added; set your page file to system controlled (or whatever the option is called) 4000mb page isnt really a good thing to have. It might encourage windows to use it more than it should.