Hey all,

This is simply a rant on the slowness of my Windows XP laptop:

Ok.........I'm a bit frustrated. I have this 2 month old Dell Latitude D600. It has a 1.3GHz Pentium M, 1Gig of RAM, a 40Gig Drive and a Burner.

It's running Windows XP Pro (because I have to have Windows for work) and some other OS's within VMware.

I just rebooted because it locked up and was acting like it had no more memory left. Upon a fresh reboot and login I launched Outlook 2003 to read my email off of the Exchange server. I don't even have any other applications open, and this thing takes like 10 seconds before I can even use Outlook. WTF?

I open up Windows 95 in VMware just for fun.......and dang is it fast. I wish we could run things this fast all the time.

It's kind of funny that as the PC's get faster and faster Windows gets more and more bloated ( I think Redhat does too ). It gets so bloated in fact that we don't feel much of a speed difference on our new systems. If you want to see exactly what I mean load Windows 95 on something above 2GHz It flies like crazy.

I really think I'm going to break down and Install Slackware 9.1 on this laptop, and then install VMware and just run Windows XP inside a VM within slackware to do my work. Then I can do everything else in Linux

Ok.............done complaining about Windows. Some days I like it. Today I can't stand the OS.

I'll enjoy reloading this with Slack

I'm out for now.....

Peace,
-W

dude, you think that's slow you wanna try my dads XP box +o(
5 minutes to start outlook in the morning, 2 minutes to start IE, he has an athlon 2200XP 1.8Ghz, 512MB PC2100, 80GB 7200RPM HDD
it takes me about 20 secs to start Kmail/Konqueror with KDE/RedHat 9, and i have a Spitfire Duron 950Mhz, 256MB PC100, and a 4GB partition on an old 5400RPM HDD

I've been thinking about the speed of computers and the bloatedness of OS's (read: Windows). Let's take a look at an old case in perspective:

Windows 3.0 vs Tandy Deskmate

When Windows 3.0 came along, most older computers felt like they were swimming in molasses. Tandy had a competing desktop system (Deskmate) that was optimized for 286 computers. As I recall, Windows 3.0 ran OK on a 386.

So there we have them. Windows pro: Advanced, good looking. Windows con: needed fast computer. Deskmate pro: worked on old hardware. Deskmate con: ugly as h***, not much features.

It's a no-brainer, isn't it? Of course Windows wins (and boy, did they!). Computers get faster and people expect more from them. It doesn't matter much that Windows gets a 100% increase in bloat every 18 months, as long as computer speed keeps up with that.

For more info (and a screen shot) look at:
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/deskmate.htm

Regards
Martin

Girlfriend runs XP on her Dell 2ghz machine and I swear my 500mhz running Slackware and Blackbox runs faster than that damn thing she has.
But she gave me the go ahead to dual boot it.. maybe I'll get her to fully switch over sooner or later... in which should be easy for her since she only downloads music, listens to music, email and internet on it.

I've never installed anything newer than Win98SE. It runs fairly well on my wife's new Athlon XP2100, but I swear it gets flakier and flakier as the years go by. When I did a fresh Win98 install on her new box with all new hardware, I had an application crash inside of 3 minutes, and a BSOD not 5 minutes later. I swear it was at least 24 hours before the first crash on other fresh Win98 installs I've done...

Whitehat -

I think my boss (as of today ex-boss ) has that same stupid dell or similar - 1.3Ghz centrino with combodrive and shared video ram I think. He couldn't figure how to set up the samba server as the gateway for the DSL I just set-up so I spent the last 1/2 hour screwing with it.

Man that thing is a slug. My duron 750 has balls compared to that. I said to my self " If I had this thing it would be 98se and Linux dual boot" I don't know what the deal is, but it is seriously not good. This guy is clueless about computers so I just figured he hosed it somehow, but if yours is a slug too.... Could be XP - I don't use it - refuse to

On the subject of XP - is it just that I'm not used to it or is everything you need for configuring things buried under several layers of non-intuitive BS. Takes me awhile to find just simple stuff.

Guess my brain is penguified

Mine has an ATI Mobile Radeon 9000 that actually kicks butt.

I really think I will install Slackware on it and just run Windows something in VMware just to use my Windows apps. I can't use wine because some stuff like Exchange administrator, and SMS Server admin etc.......won't run in Wine

Man is that laptop a dog......

Right now I'm on a PIII 700MHz box with 384MB of RAM and it's way better than that Dell Laptop. I'm beginning to believe that some of these "newer faster" PC's are not really that "new or fast"

The Athlon XP 1800+ that I used to have (that I built myself) was much faster than this Dell Laptop

Peace,
-W

I think the patches for XP are a big part of the slowness. I dual boot RH 9 and XP Pro on my D600 1.6 Ghz and on a fresh install it wasn't too bad. Then I patched XP for security and really paid the price in speed.

rh 9.0 HAULS on it.

If you still have crashes, try upgrading the network driver. My whole system would randomly hang and require a power switch shutdown (two times in 4 days of final exams) until I re installed the network drivers with an updated version. So far, no hangs.

And don't forget the 25% speed hit due to windows xp fluff (window dressing, menu behavior special effects). It is simply amazing how much we sacrifice to have a pretty blue (mac looking) screen in Windows. My SuSE 9 side runs way faster than my Xp side on my laptop, even with the fluff disabled. Sad MS, sad...

not wishing to promote wintendo, but....

my XP Pro box runs basics (browsers / office apps / email etc) as fast as my linux machines installations (it's not as steady, but that's another story). Admittedly I have hacked about with it a fair bit.

Linux wins on video, music, programming, stability, cost and sheer flexibility every time though.

If it's your box (and not owned by work), trying cutting down on the services you don't need.

Start>Run: services.msc (but make sure you know what each is, before you cut it off) - if you're not sure www.blackviper.com published a pretty good guide. You can get it down to 8 services at boot time - I suggest you don't go that far.

I have witnessed this on several laptops where XP is installed with fast processors and 512MB memory, over time each one getting slower and slower...........

Since 6 months, I notice no slow down on my HP Omnibook with SuSE 8.2

So can anyone say why XP gets slower and slower?

an excellent question why they slow down but man they do, don't they?? I have read various explanations of why - the obvious points are a buildup of internet cache and fragmentation, but even when that stuff is maintained it slows down. I've also read something else compelling - that the registry files and logs grow so huge that Windows spends more time looking for what it wants, and that this stuff is a function of the time since last re install and the number of apps installed / uninstalled.

Either way, dual booting friggin rocks. All the arguments on this board about "why Linux over Windows" are kind of missing the point. It really comes down to preference. Let's be frank: we use Linux because it's fun and we want to and it appeals to our sense of righteous indignation at M$'s appalling conduct. But at the end of the day, as much as we love Linux, there ARE a lot of aps written for XP and there IS a whole world out their running it. Why not have the best of both worlds? I run Linux as much as humanly possible and I network it to my Apple iBook. But when I co on campus and have to authenticate on their domain to get files or share printers, I have XP ready to go. the best of all worlds!

buttersoft: same here, any windoze i've ever used start running like treacle after 6 months, i've had my current RH9 installed since february and i've had no slowdown.
i give it quite a hard time as well, as opposed to some windoze boxes that get an easy ride with some IMing, web browsing and emailing

well, here's my experience on speed difference with linux and windows:
I first had Windows XP installed on my comp (check for specs in siggie). I had disabled all graphic goodies, and shutdown all unknown services. Then I went to play Wolfenstein: ET. It ran at a decent speed using 640x480 16bit, low details. Now I have Gentoo installed, and i play Wolfenstein: ET at 800x600 32bit medium detail, and it runs faster than on Windows XP.

I love linux... I now have an uptime of 18 days, and I haven't had any problems yet, gaming runs at the same speed as when I just rebooted my comp.