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I eventually got to reboot the computer. It feels much 'snappier' now, for a lack of a better term. I have 2 desktop computers running 50-150 days without between reboots. They're stable. Except this issue that when they have to access lots of files from a hard disk, they behave as if out of memory: unresponsive and writing to the disk a lot. I'll keep investigating.

I am experiencing poor disk or cache performance after Windows XP has been up for 20 or more days. Loading a web browser now takes a long time, during which there is unusually heavy disk access. System has 3 GB of RAM, out of which 1 to 2 GB is in use. An unfragmented 2 GB Swap file (partition) is also enabled. Rebooting the system greatly improves performance, compared to closing all processes and reopening them. Is it possible to flush the cache without a reboot, or tweak it so that the problem doesn't occur? Some stats about current memory usage Under System->Performance I have currently set: Adjust for best performance of: Background services Memory usage: Programs UpTime 5802845 sec (67 days, 3 hours, 54 min, 5 sec)

My drive was manufactured in June 2013 (Date: 13496) and has firmware SC42. I have had a VX (SV35), which didn't have the APM function at all (instead of it being set to an inactive value). I change the APM setting using any available tool. In my case, HDAT2. The Device Configuration Overlay, also editable by HDAT2, can be used to selectively disable features of the drive, such as shrink its capacity, or prevent a Host Protected Area to be set, which is useful for some BIOSes that copy data into this locked area. APM cannot be disabled in DCO on Seagate drives. But I discovered that as a side effect, editing the DCO also saves the current APM value, as I described in my linked thread on Seagate forums. Otherwise this value was lost for me (and many other people), requiring that it is reset after a power cycle. I am unsure of the exact steps needed to save the APM value, but the method so far worked on 2 drives.

I have tested the drive. It comes with APM preset to 0xC0, which does nothing. The drive does not enter a standby mode by itself, and load/unload cycles are equal to power cycles. APM can still be disabled or set to an arbitrary value by restoring/editing the DCO. I have disabled APM on my unit, even though it was not necessary. On the table the NAS HDD is 4-5 °C cooler than an SV35 of the same configuration. Read speeds on my system are in range of 170 MB/s - 80 MB/s, or 20% slower than the other drive spinning at 7200 rpm. The NAS HDD is compatible with Intel SATA/150, where read speeds cap at 120 MB/s. Both drives are practically inaudible. With the "chirping" it was almost ridiculous. I had booted a fresh OS from a boot CD, browsed the web with it. And while I was reading an article, the drive would park the heads, alerting me and taking attention away from what I was reading. When I moused over something or clicked a link, the drive would chirp again, to allow the browser to write to the cache.

Welcome to the forums, and thank you for following the signup process to describe your experience. The drive must be capable to store the power configuration, probably on the platters themselves. Current models are indeed quiet in operation. I'm not concerned about noise part of normal operation, which can even complement activity LEDs (in which case a hdd can be too quiet), but only if it becomes signal of a problem. According to this manual, APM is not supported, and the drive would enter standby mode only if the host had set the standby timer. The problem experienced earlier occurred even without a host. I have ordered a NAS HDD and will see how it performs.

I have found that Windows XP SP3 can't be trimmed as small as SP1 for low memory systems. SP1, being XP, can run more new applications than Win2k (relatively new drivers such as nVidia video drivers, including most that err out on EncodePointer). An anti-virus might not be needed depending on who (and how) uses the computer. Perhaps one could rely on most other people scanning for viruses in files published on the web, and using an online service for on-demand checks.

I'm seeing no increases in CPU usage between Flash 11.4.402 and 11.8.800, which I currently have at hand. Both hover at 40% on my sample video from above with DXVA. CPU is consumed only when the video window is visible, other times the usage is around 10%, which suggests that not the decoding but the composition is the slow part in Flash video. If enabling acceleration in Flash settings already decreases CPU usage by half on HD videos (allowing the card to handle most decoding but not composition), a video card upgrade will not give further improvement. (But Flash 11.4 is 9 MB and Flash 11.8 is 16 MB, which almost double the size in memory in such a short time.)

I tried installing GIMP. It loaded the graphical representations of all layers correctly (no text, no adjustment or fill, or blending effects), which is good enough. Its resampling appears to be identical to IrfanView's. (slightly more ringing in the left image) GIMP can also load PSD files with transparency and save them without apparent loss. I think I can use it in place of IrfanView now. The version I got to run (2.4.7) doesn't have as many options for text processing though. And the GTK gui looks kinda ugly.

I have Adobe Photoshop 7. When I perform resizing, either of the whole image canvas or by choosing Edit -> Transform upon the current layer, there is always sharpening being done during the process. I rather wish this didn't happen. For example, 0. Original 1. Downscaled to 67% (doesn't have to be a screenshot) 2. Downscaled to 67% in IrfanView I sometimes export the picture to IrfanView, resize it, and bring it back into Photoshop for further processing. This doesn't work for layers with transparency. I understand why one would sometimes apply some sharpening (usually less than Photoshop uses). But in like in this example, I might want to blend the Windows logo with some background and photographed/scanned text, where the sharpened edges of the logo look too jagged in comparison. Are there versions of Photoshop that have customizable resampling methods, so that sharpening can be avoided?

I'm considering getting a Seagate hard drive for a tower system that is operating 24/7. The new "NAS HDD" model line (STx000VN000) looks appealing since it was built for reliability. However, there was this issue with head parking after short periods of inactivity, which produced a relatively loud scraping noise, much like that of a floppy loading ("chirp"). In the current SV35 series (VX), head parking could be disabled by forcing the drive to remember the Advanced Power Management mode, and recent drives even came without this function at all. Seagate states that for the new NAS HDD: "NASWorks provides 24×7 operation profiles and advanced power management modes to help drives go into the appropriate sleep or standby mode; this maximizes power conservation, minimizes time-to-data and improves overall reliability and performance." So I fear that APM might be back. Can any owners of a NAS HDD report if the drive does head parking? (Loading "drivers" for a HDD to get rid of APM is not an option. It must be able to remember the APM mode, or lack of it.)

A Kingston DT111 (ven. 0951, dev. 1666) finally arrived. It's working well with PIIX4 and ICH1 with USP3. Everest on the old computers identifies the device as USB 2.1. I'll order a couple more of these. I'll keep in mind that I can try a hub for newer devices. The purpose of these media is only file transfer. We still have a couple Pentium III office machines where I put the unofficial service pack on (but replacing the computers is not my call), and I own a retro gaming machine with a Mendocino Celeron.

I see USB 3.0 flash memory on sale and it's been replacing USB 2.0. Most of the models state compatibility with 2.0, as expected, but few mention 1.1. I am in need of USB drives that work in old Win98 PCs. Are all new drives backwards compatible down to USB 1.1?

I want it to be fanless. I could get a 620 locally, but have no way of telling if its cooling is sufficient beforehand, and if I can draw more power from this motherboard. Do twice as many CUDA cores also approximately double gaming performance? Edit: I replaced the 610 with another card of the same type, and the computer has so far always booted. :-)

VEVO uses a different transport protocol (RTMP), so their videos can't be played in generic players as easily. That is great if your program works, because VEVO has higher quality content, which seems to be further transcoded when uploaded to YT. I think Flash video is so slow because it must overlay semi-transparent annotations and occasionally some controls on top of the picture, which can't be done if the video is hardware accelerated. The picture is probably always converted to RGB. I find that I can also always capture a video frame played in Flash video with Print Screen, but cannot do that from fast video players. Still, FFdshow with conversion to RGB only uses about 80% of CPU on this sample. If I open a semitransparent OSD in the program, it uses more and cannot be played. But Flash operates in the slow mode all the time (the Play icon fades in and out, annotations, menus launched from the bottom bar). If Adobe "fixes" the player, they will probably only accelerate it on new OS using some new window manager technology. XP is just "not supported".

I'll use your second opinion and replace the video adapter before giving the PC away as planned. The system appears to be stable when using integrated video too. I was confused when the entire computer didn't freeze or reboot upon the error as usual.

I have had trouble playing 1280 pixel videos with higher framerate on a Pentium 4, comparable with the speed of the machine in the OP. There are two reasons: 1) the webpage is ridiculously fat with scripts that get executed if the user runs the mouse over any controls, 2) the Flash plugin is slow to decode and especially to render any video. I am still puzzled why people like sites like this. Which process in the task manager is causing increased CPU usage when the slowdowns occur? If VLC can stream your videos without interruptions and consumption of disk space, watching them outside of the website will deal with both issues, and also improve color quality (Flash player doesn't upsample chroma correctly). I use this extension for Opera, which presents all available video formats in a compact menu (usually 720p MP4 or 480p FLV are the best). Add an item to the context menu (standard_menu.ini) to all links, enabling to pass them onto a media player. --------------------GhostItem, M_INSPECT_ELEMENT = Inspect elementItem, Open in MPlayer=Execute program, "d:\apps\mplayer\mpui.exe","%l"The average CPU usage of this 720p@30fps video: in MPlayer – 44%, in browser – 90% (with large peaks while not interacting with the page), in browser with DXVA – 37%, in MPC-HC with DXVA – <5%. (single core Conroe CPU at 1.6 GHz). Not quite what you asked; but this method works for me well to watch single videos. I suppose VLC and MPlayer are about equal. MPlayer can set variable cache for streamed content; the default of 1 MB works well for me.

My bad, I forgot about AHCI. I fully agree that Ivy Bridge is the last fully functional platform for XP. NT5 has been with us for over a decade! Relevant to good existing sound cards is also the absence of parallel PCI in Haswell chipsets. I specifically picked my board because it had PCI, but I have not yet tested it with a soundcard as it will not be used with one at the moment.

"Support" usually boils down to whether there are drivers for each individual component. It may be easier for the manufacturer to say that an application is "not supported" than to explain that one or more features of their product don't always work. So far it seems that all key components, except USB 3.0, do have drivers. I'm sure someone will release a "native usb driver" when the 3.0 speeds become relevant. I also successfully installed Windows onto a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H, which has the new shiny BIOS, without doing anything particular. The BIOS has all the crucial compatibility/legacy options, in particular IDE emulation for SATA, and comes with the pre-set in compatibility mode by default. The OS initially didn't boot, but I suspect it had to do with XP failing to write the boot sector properly on the drive partitioned with GParted. After I refreshed the boot sectors with BootICE, the system booted fine. XP with the latest updates was fully functional initially. Installing the Intel chipset INFs, hid the unknown USB device, among other things. Realtek generally sounds good. It is also present on this board. Their biggest deficiencies are lack of precise control (you can't pick the sampling rate, and set signal routing), and the ridiculous size of the control panel that does so little useful work. The quality of Realtek has definitely improved, as it no longer appears to switch as eagerly between mic/headphone/speaker when jack sensing encounters unexpected impedance. Realtek does offer stereo mix as a recording source. Recording works fine, but only at 16 bits. Realtek can also finally output 2 independent audio streams, but only to the rear and front, without other routing choices possible. Audio playback is stable under load, and doesn't interrupt.

I finished building a new system and encountered a problem with video. The video card would occasionally hang and continue displaying the picture that was on at the moment of the hang. To get it to respond again, I must reboot. In some cases the computer will not be bootable as if it had no graphics card (will fall back to integrated video, or beep if IGP is disabled) until I remove and reattach the VGA cable to its DVI-I port. Subsequently the D-Sub works again. After I assembled the system, I proceeded to configure the BIOS (graphical mode) and then test the system with memtest and hdat2 (text mode). In both cases, the display would sometimes hang when I just touched the PC, such as ejected and loaded the CD tray, or if I removed the video cable during a prolonged test to work on another computer. After I reattached the monitor, I could see the screen where it hang. Software could then still cause disk activity, make sounds through the PC speaker, and the computer could be soft-rebooted via Ctrl-Alt-Del. I tried re-seating the card in its slot, and adjust the speed of the PCI-E slot in BIOS, but this didn't solve the problem. At this point no drivers or OS are installed. I inserted another video card, an old Radeon X550, and the system appeared to be stable during installation of Windows XP, and remained so after I installed drivers and launched a game. Both cards should have comparable power consumption (<30W), with the replacement maybe slightly less. Upon inserting the faulty card in another computer, it initially failed to boot and went into a reboot cycle. It began working again after I, with power removed, switched the video cable to the other port, without removing the card itself. Video card: Asus GT 610, 1 GB Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H (uefi bios) Power supply: Fortron 500W CPU: Ivy Bridge G2030 Memory: 4 GB DDR3 What can I do to diagnose if the card or another component of the new system is faulty?

This works for most of the updated DX9 DLLs. None of the d3dx9_NN.dll need to be fully installed by executing the installer.nVidia Control Panel v3.4.772.10 / ForceWare 263.09 works well for me together with driver 314.22; all essential functionality is present, including custom resolutions and game profiles. The most recent Control Panel didn't install for me, but apparently there is significant forwards compatibility with this software. The driver indeed has an image quality issue; by default the driver will output studio range colors (16-235) with different contrast for green, unless changed using the Control Panel to full range (0-255). This manifests as reduced "washed out" contrast overall. I'm not sure where in the registry this setting is. It seems to be stored for each monitor output separately. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{558F4A7D-61A5-48E1-B29E-4E2A1A28D53C}\0000] "_User_SUB0_CRT1_XALG_Color_Range"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "_User_SUB0_CRT1_XEN_Color_Range"=hex:01,00,00,80

Thank you for the good reference, Tripredacus, which cleared my doubts. MSFN is a trusted source, and usually critical of Microsoft if there is a reason. I feel that the question's been answered. These are two video games, which I am not proud to admit. One of them didn't run (Sports Car GT), and another one kept losing keyboard input (Half-Life), which may or may not have to do with how keyboard layouts are switched. They worked fine under SP1 on the same computer, set up similarly by myself. Discovering the underlying mechanism is beyond my skill level. I've used SP3 for only a month now, and have not too much experience with it. I guess the same question could be asked in the Win2000 forum, since XP is a subversion of the same OS line... My main XP SP1 system is still holding up well, even after upgrading the video adapter. I've successfully installed the nVidia driver, which initially failed due to DecodePointer. With the above patch, the most recent Opera browser, and Media Player Classic are working, to give a couple popular examples.

More and more recent software doesn't run under vanilla Windows XP and SP1 because of unimplemented functions DecodePointer and EncodePointer in KERNEL32.dll. I have found this 64 kB patch (mirror), which enables most applications to work again. They still don't work under Windows 2000, because of other dependencies, which makes this question unsuitable for the Win2k forum. I trust XP SP1 because I've ran it stable with great uptimes, and have also encountered software which doesn't work correctly under SP3 and reportedly also under SP2. Overall, my experience with this OS has been better than with Win2k even, which is why I want to continue running it on machines that are capable of that. This function appears to be security related. According to Microsoft, encoded pointers can be used to provide another layer of protection for pointer values. But is the real reason why it exists to sabotage older OS, and force an upgrade?

Thank you BlackWingCat. I got them installed now. Also: nice, compact direct downloads of the Flash plugin.

I was trying to apply the Extended Kernel update to install the recent nVidia Driver. But Extended Kernel failed to install due to missing "MS12-052 (KB2722913)". The download for this that I was able to find was 3.3 GB, which is excessive. Could you list links to all the required components part of the update in your first post?

Is it possible to add a vertical scroll bar to the control containing BeginPrompt text to display more text in it than fits in the dialog (description of the archive contents, usage of the software in it, etc.)? I am considering migrating to SevenZip from WinRar to use a larger compression dictionary, and need this functionality that's present in WinRar SFX modules (both old ones and new ones that call a MSIE window to show the text). Sample screenshot