My computer was running on 98 fine, till it decided to kill itself when some file went missing. Tried reinstalling 98, but win98 still whined about the missing file. Anyway I finally decided to go to XP. Everything works. But almost everything is slower. Except for my DOS programs, which stayed at its original speed, all the other stuff slowed down, inclusive of the Freebasic stuff. How do I speed it up short of converting to NTFS?
Are you using the video card driver supplied by Windows? If so, you'll want to download a newer one from the manufacturer's website.
If that's not the problem, you might not have enough RAM. XP requires at least 256 MB to run decently. (You can run it with 128 MB or less, but you'll see a big improvement if you step it up to 256 or more.)
Have you upgraded to SP2? It's supposed to make your system faster. Also, turn off unnecessary services( I dunno the exact list ) but someone will surely provide you with one or try too google =P
Exactly. The default graphics drivers do all the GUI stuff using software. Downloading specific drivers for your video card and Windows XP will speed up things a tad.
Also playing with the swap file (virtual memory). Just set it to a fixed size which is between twice and three times your physical memory, i.e. if you have 256 Mb RAM Set it to 512 or 640 Mb. Having an old HDD (let's say 1 Gb HDD) formatted using FAT32 dedicated exclusively to hold the swap file will help tads, specially if you leave it alone in the secondary IDE or sharing it with something that's not very accessed like a CDROM drive. Why? Think about it: if Windows has to write and read data to the virtual memory it will be faster if it has the cable in exclusive. Having the swap file in your main HDD is slower 'cause Windows can't, for example, read from the HDD and write to the swap file at the same time.
Also what's been said about RAM: With less than 256 Mb, Windows XP craws. But with 256 or more it flies and performs better on newer systems that the older Windows versions. Think about a huge soccer player. If he plays in a small field it won't perform as good as a short soccer player. But if the field is bigger it will have more space to move and will perform better
The NTFS format isn't faster, but slower sometimes. It performs better when moving or deleting a file, for example, but a bit slower in normal read/writes. Not a big deal, though. The advantage of NTFS is that it manages big HDDs better, performing way better and wasting less HDD space. If your HDD is (let's say) bigger than 20 Gb I'd go for NTFS. Plus, alas, it's way more secure and gives you the ability to cipher sensible data if you like.
If you have a 128 Mb RAM computer which is slower than a PIII 733 Mhz I'd rather use Windows 2000 SP4.