RE: Why old PC so slow

["Robert D. Holtz - Lists" <robert dot d dot holtz at gmail dot com>]

It's more than likely a combination of things.

Windows carries quite a bit of junk in the trunk that you don't need.  Do
some 'net searches on "TinyXP".  This is a slimmed down version of XP
floating around out there.

Any anti-spyware and anti-virus software will kill performance.  These may
be a necessary evil for you.  If they're not consider removing them.

Running a native Linux distro will be much faster than the "thing on a
thing" approach.  I know of a machine slower than the one you're burdened
with that performs quite well under the Fedora variants.  Be careful about
installing too many services/daemons.

See what speed your hard drives are running at, i.e., IDE or SATA 33, 66,
100, 150 etc., and consider putting in the fastest one that your BIOS will
support.  This is often the main cause for sluggish performance.  I had a
machine here at home with an IDE 33mhz interface for the system volume and
switched this to a SATA 150mhz drive and the speed bump was considerable.
It went from taking close to two minutes to load everything down to less
than 15 seconds.

Throwing more memory at it will also make a difference.

-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-talk-owner@cygwin.com [mailto:cygwin-talk-owner@cygwin.com] On
Behalf Of zzapper
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 2:52 PM
To: cygwin-talk@cygwin.com
Subject: Why old PC so slow

Hi
I've stripped down my old PC 600Mhz to have just Windows 2 or 3 Apps and 
Cygwin defragged it etc.

It's still very slooow and I wonder how I ever managed to use it, is it 
basically Windows itself that has grown monstrously since the PC was new or 
is because I'm used to much faster machines

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