Whats holding me back?!

[CompStomp]

I just built a new computer for the folks with these parts:

E8400
corsair 4b 5-5-5-18-2t
9800 GTX
Seagate 7200.11 500gb 32mb cache

And this may be nitpicking a bit, but on my friends system.... which has a Q6600, 4gb ram, and a seagate 250gb 7200.10 16mb cache.... He can click on firefox and it instantly loads up, you can't even see the hourglass.
On my system I click firefox and it is not instant.... It takes 1/2 second to 1 second to pop up.

We both have windows 32 bit, my is home edition, his is pro.

Its not really a big deal, but I'm just afraid something isn't performing up to par since mine shouldn't be any slower, performing such a task, than his.



Thanks for any help!


EDIT:

I don't know if it matters any, but once I've brought the first firefox browers up all the others I bring up load instantly. Which is what my friends computer does, only it also loads the first instantly.

 

[Proximon]

Probably just prefetching. Google it.

 

[CompStomp]

But he's done nothing to his computer to tell it to prefetch firefox.
We both just have the newest version of firefox, and google for the home page.

 

[bobbknight]

Network latency is a factor.

 

[MRFS]

Make sure your HDD is configured for 32-bit transfers in the BIOS.

Also, make a drive image of your C: system partition (as a precaution) then defragment that partition.

The Widows defragger works OK as long as no other application programs are running on your system.

It may not be THE BEST software for XP systems, but it should re-write all .exe programs onto logically sequential sectors.


MRFS

 

[buzznut]

Yeah, unless you are on the same network with same equipment...

So the browser after the first time has the page loaded into memory, or cache so each time that link comes up, it can load faster.

This is not a good test for system performance. Try to run 3dmark06 on his machine and then yours.

 

[MRFS]

> We both have windows 32 bit, my is home edition, his is pro.


I'm not absolutely sure that the following advice will work with
XP Home Edition, because we use XP Pro exclusively, so take this advice with a grain of salt

The following is a more esoteric optimization, thus caveat user:

To my knowledge the E8400 supports Data Execution Prevention ("DEP"), which can be enabled at My Computer | Properties | Advanced | Performance | Data Execution Prevention.

This will automatically ENABLE Physical Address Extension ("PAE") mode,
which should better utilize your 4GB of RAM.

Intel CPUs have supported 36-bit internal hardware addressing for a very long time, but Windows x32 is stuck with 32-bit addressing, logically speaking.

If you right-click on "My Computer" and then choose "Properties", XP should report whether PAE is enabled or not.

If enabled, XP should show "Physical Address Extension" in so many words.

Just be FORE-WARNED: some older and/or inferior device drivers do NOT like PAE, because they were programmed with an incompatible mode of memory addressing. If your system becomes unstable with PAE enabled, then DISABLE DEP.


MRFS

 

[jeteryankees22]

I have had similar problems with myComputer and myDocuments...One thing you can do is completely uninstall firefox and then reinstall, if that doesnt work and a defragment doesnt either...reinstall xp and make sure you install firefox alone w/o other apps running