16mb cache in newer hds

[Wesley1357]

1st does your harddrive runs slower than the first day you first installed windows? can this happen because you have to much data in it?

do 16mb cache makes a difference?

[Lazn_Work]

This is a known windows problem, even Microsoft admits it: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/northrup_restoreperf.mspx

It has nothing to do with the amount of data etc. it is just that windows is sloppy and so over time slows down.

==>Lazn

[tesfaye]

I don't know about the whole it's a known Windows problem thing. Drives get fragmented overtime. I know that statement may start a flame war since there exists a camp which feels that NTFS doesn't get fragmented but that just ain't so. The problem isn't really with Windows but with programs that don't clean up after themselves since they leave entries behind in the registry. So the more items that you leave in the registry then the more items Windows has to sort through to find what it needs. HKLM\Software\Classes is a nice place to look to see the nice chunk of data that needs to be referenced frequently.

Some programs just aren't coded very well and can hold up certain processes. A program waiting to catch an event will get it and due to shitty coding may delay the result of your action from occuring until the crap program has returned control back to the system. Try limiting the amount of shell integration if you can. Toolbar addon's are a big problem (at least the crappy ones are).

I've run a standard Windows installation for a few months with just Office on it and all updates and with the usual defrag and cleaning of temp files which is neccesary due to the way Word sifts through the temp folder before creating or opening documents I noticed that the performance didn't degrade. This is in contrast to my main machine that gets heavy use and has all sorts of stuff on it and it did get a little slower over the same period of time. Even after removing all the unneeded junk from it I never did get back the just like new performance that I enjoyed for the first couple of months. It depends on what you consider slow. I noticed the difference beacause it's my baby but in the grand scheme of things the machine is wicked fast.

16MB cache doesn't seem to have a huge effect on performance and definately not the issues associated with having a ton of data on it. Check out StorageReview.com for info on drive cache. It will help while writing data to the disk.

[Wesley1357]

thanks.

registry has always been a problem.