emachine poor performance running XP

I have worked with three machines now that are Emachines
with Windows XP. All the three where the same, 900 Mhz,
with 128m Ram. These computer run slower than my 350 Mhz
laptop which is running XP. I mean really slow. The
Emachines take forever to boot up and the keyboard and
mouse responds to command slow. The whole machine is slow.
Why are Emachine that are rated at 900 Mhz so slow with
XP?? What should be changed in the computers to make them
act right? Is it memory, the hard drive, or just a bad
processor?

 

Hi kcooper225
The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "e-machine" is how much crud they have loading at start up. Have you pruned it down to it's barest nessessities?

Daizy

 

Adding to Daizy's comments

If I recall 128 MB is minimum spec for XP.

While it is "Services" based compared to the Win9x family which is "Resources" based, you are still going to be doing ALOT of swapping with the HDD. - This makes it a function of the hardware, and I think if its e- its economy rather than performance. (oops, in xp they refer to it as paging not swapping...)

case in point - a GTW Performance series system will come with a 7200rpm drive with 2mb cache and at minimum UATA100 - yet I have seen systems which use 4400rpm U66 512K cache HDD's - in a low mem situation you are waiting on mechanical processes to complete which magnify the problem.

(did I add enough smoke to cloud the issue?)

 

I have not checked just what is loading on start up. On XP this should not be as much a problem as with older versions of Windows. I do agree that each item loaded does have some effect.
The whole E-Machine and WIndows XP is too **** slow. You would think that you are using a 133 Mhz machine and these are 900 Mhz system. You click and wait.
That is why I think that is might be memory and/or a super slow hard drivers. I can take the system from 128 megs of ram to 256 , but is that where the real problem is? It has to be the processor, the hard drive, memory or something new that makes these machine the pits. It may say 900 mhz, but it is not close at all to running at that speed. I work on computers everyday so I know. I just do not know what is wrong with Emachines.

 

900 pIII or Celeron?

Also if you can steal mem from another system for a performace test - do it, then you will have a better idea where the problems are.

 

A great thread for some tips on speeding up XP

Daizy