[plug] OT WAY OT

[Shannon Carver]

Yea, my Dell D820 that I've had for almost a year now has SATA drives, I 
had the problem that I couldnt install XP on the machnine when I got it 
as I didn't have the SATA drivers or a floppy..   A slipstreamed XP/SP2 
CD fixed all that though,.  In the end I only use XP occasionally for 
work stuff anyway (Visual Studio 2005).

To Alex's question's, is it slow before the windows boot process starts, 
or while booting windows?  I.e does it take ages to find the boot 
loader/hdd (i.e hardware/hdd/RAM problems), or does it sit at the 
Windows XP logo with the scroll bar for a while, or the windows startup 
screen before it??

If the latter/  You want to get your installation as clean as possible, 
even my work machine (Intel Core2Duo with 2GB RAM) can quite easily slow 
down and get clogged down if running inefficiently. (A few tips):
- Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs (Remove unrequired programs)
- Start Run -> msconfig.exe (Remove as much as posslbe from Startup, I 
mean everything thats not windows specific)
- Disable Real-time virus protection, if you know how to use a PC, 
really, this shouldn't be required. If you have Nortono Antivirus DELETE 
it straight away, I've seen many benchmarks suggesting that no matter 
how powerful the machine NAV will make drive access, general responsive 
ness 40% slower.
- Go into Internet Explorer, Tools->Options->Delete 
Cookies/Cache/History (Always helps, especially if it hasn't been done 
in a while)
- Delete all from C:\Temp & C:\Windows\Temp
- Delete all from C:\Documents And Settings\<user account>\Local 
Settings\Temp from all user accounts (I find this really helps, 
performance definitely degrades as this directory grows larger)
- Disable unused Windows Services (There are some great guides on the 
net detailing whats important and whats not).

On the other hand, a slow startup and poor network performance sounds 
like virus/spyware or an annoying background p2p style application going 
mad in the background.  Going over the above should help with this anyway!

In the past, (I once did a fair bit of support work on the side), I've 
had clients bring me windows machines that are basically brand new and 
quite decent, with boot times above 3-4mins, and with a bunch of the 
above steps reduced this back to under 30s.

Manually doing the above works a lot better than 
tweaking/cleaning/removals software

Hope this helps

Shannon

W.Kenworthy wrote:
> Half your luck - I have a new dell at work with a built-in "USB" cdrom
> (actually SATA I think) - the gentoo (2006.1) boot disk loses its root
> half way through the boot process.  I am using a FC6 livecd to bootstrap
> the gentoo install as it needs a very late kernel to boot AND a recent
> network card driver.
>
> One weird thing is that earlier kernels ignore the SATA interface and
> boot IDE only and work fine - but they cant see the network card.
>
> It *should* have been so easy :(
>
> BillK
>
>
> On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 16:23 +0900, Gregory Orange wrote:
>   
>> sothisistheinternet wrote:
>>     
>>> Unlikely to be sata on a laptop...unless it's something bleeding edge 
>>> that I'm unaware of from HP. As Shannon asked: what's the issue?
>>>       
>> I bought an HP notebook (nx6320 or nc6320 from memory) a few weeks ago 
>> which contained a SATA drive. It caused problems until I disabled 
>> "Native SATA mode" in BIOS as directed by HP. Then there's a driver 
>> which I've yet to install, which should enable MS Windows to see the 
>> drive with this mode re-enabled.
>>
>> Thankfully I had no such trouble booting the machine using a Gentoo 
>> bootdisk for many enjoyable seconds of filesystem manipulation.
>>
>> Greg.
>> _______________________________________________
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>> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
>> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
>>     
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>