What affects the operating speed of winxp?

[Exodia]

Im just curious...

Why does winxp slow to a crawl during high levels of disk accessing, but doesnt slow to a crawl during high cpu usage?

Im running an amd 1800+ with 512megs, 160gigs of total space and a gforce3 ti 200. I do lots of video editing and encoding and when i do, cpu usage goes to 100%. While my videos are being encoded, i can easily open and run other programs without too much slow down. But when i burn these videos (4gig average) my computer slows to a point where its unusable, even using programs as simple as notepad suffer from this. Cpu usage is always less then 10% but disk access is obviously high. I expect slow response from programs that need to be loaded and need access to the HD, but why would a program like notepad, thats already loaded, suffer so much?

[Shark007]

IDE [P]ATA harddrive's are at fault for this.

SCSI or ATA will set you free.

P = Parallel interface

S = Serial interface

(floppy disk access will also cause this)

Shark007

[Exodia]

Thanks shark... i'll be setting myself free with my next upgrade this summer.

[gui_m]

how exactly does WinXP benefit from SATA? i know it has a larger bandwidth but does that cause the big difference?

[Aaron]

Thanks for that info Shark007, its now obvious that my current IDE drives is the serious bottleneck in this high-spec PC.

I'll be getting myself a WD Raptor 74GB SATA drive soon!

[XtremeMaC]

Hey aaron

that i'm thinking of buying myself too

10000rpm 74gb sata aaa lovely even the thought of it gets me

(i might get 37gb just for windows and games though, i've 7200rpm 120gb external hdd for other stuff...)

ok how does xp benefit from sata. 2 things

1. usually the sata drives are 10000 rpm if not at least 7200rpm. that speed change and the reason why its making windows faster should be obvious. say u're searching for a file in your hdd right. well in 7200rpm if u were to do it in 1min u should be able to do it in 30sec with 10000rpm (this is a very rough explanation)

2. the increased bandwidth: to my extend i think it means the amount of data transfered from various components on mb to the hdd. and from hdd to cd/dvd roms and vice versa.

i've a question as well

what does the cache on the hdd really do?

i found this on another forum

Larger cache == lower seek times.

but to me it shouldn't be the case

what's the benefit of having a higher cache? (i searched google, well obviously i'm not a good searcher )

I've 8mb cache 120gb wd hdd..

[Datalore]

A buffer is a temporary storage area. The hard disk buffer is a portion of the hard drive allocated to RAM used to speed up access to data on a disk. The hard disk buffer acts as a holding area for data so that the processor is free to perform other functions. The larger the buffer size, the more information can be temporarily stored and the quicker it can be accessed.

(Buffer = cache) From this page.

[kenkueh]

However, although u got a SCSI 15Krpm on your high spec system, if u burn data to ur cd-rw or dvd-rw, it will slow down ur whole system. this is b'cos cd-rw and dvd-rw still using PATA and not SATA. A high speed HDD will get win xp and other programs to load faster.

Regards,

kenkueh