Windows is slow...could it be hardware?

[Kanaz]

I have a machine that is running an MSI KT4 Ultra-SR Motherboard, AthlonXp 2800+ (333FSB), 512MB DDR-2700 (CAS 2.5), MSI GF4TI42008X(128MB), & Western Digital 80GB drive. THis is all running on Windows 98SE.

The machine runs slow, seems like a 1.0GHz system. Could this be hardware, or simply Windows 98?

"You need to be trusted by the people that you lie to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you get the chance to put the knife in." -Pink Floyd, ‘Dogs’

 

[sturm]

any red or yellow flags under device manager? Are u sure the cpu is running at the proper speed(multiplier,fsb set right) All the drivers installed for chipset, sound, lan, audio?

 

[goloap]

Assuming that you have checked that the slow down is not caused by any hardware problems, it may be caused by the fact the win98 gets 'messed up' after a while. How long as it been since you installed win98? If it was more than one year ago, I suggest you do a clean install it will get you back your perfomance that you lost.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies

 

[Rubberbband]

Open the System.ini file in a text editor, such as Notepad.

Go to the [vcache] section.

Add these lines, or change the settings to this, directly under [vcache]:

MinFileCache=4096
MaxFileCache=131072

Save the changes and reboot.

Then go directly to the BIOS, and try to open the AGP aperture to 256, if the BIOS supports an aperture that large. That's pretty standard with 512MB of RAM. 1/2 the size of the physically-installed memory.

The vcache is basically a set of memory addresses for the disk caching virtual device driver.

In Win9x, when you install 512MB of RAM or more, a bug in the OS correspondingly raises the size of the vcache, and this can become as large as 800MB when controlled by Windows. But the vcache settings must always be smaller than the size of the physically installed RAM, or it can cause blue screens and out-of-memory errors.

Also, the AGP port uses a set of memory addresses that are very close to the vcache. This is a cache for texturing, and so, for example, if you have a video card with 32MB of RAM, another 32MB is allocated for AGP texturing. If these addresses overlap, the again, you get blue screens.

The settings I posted for you caused the minimum size of the cache to be 4MB, which is good for performance. The maximum number set the upper limit for the cache at 128MB, which is not only sufficient for the virtual device driver and the cache, but also better for performance. The standard rule-of-thumb in this kind of situation is that the maximum number is really the important one, and that it should be set at around 25% of your RAM.

After making the changes, the memory addresses cannot overlap and cause a protection fault when the disk caching virtual device driver and the AGP port start fighting over the RAM addresses during the boot, which is exactly what was happening on your machine.


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[unitron]

As goloap have suggested in his post, the best way to get
the speed back into your OS is to do a clean install,
assuming you installed it quite some time ago and have been
install/uninstalling proggies all this while. The
alternative is to edit your registry and remove any unwanted
keys and value, I suggest using Norton Systemwork suite
of tools for this if you are not into registry editing.

Also try using windows System Config Util by typing 'msconfig'
in the run command box and go to the Startup tab
there and unchecking everything except SysTray,
ScanReg and TaskMon.

Hope this help.