Weird or what? (pentium 4 speed)

[Nick]

Doing a re-build for a mate, she's given me her PC to gut to make the new one and I booted it up to save her docs folder and some other bits on the HD.

The first thing I noticed was that it was dog slow... I mean REALLY slow.

The machine is running XP home, pre-installed from Packard Bell.

The CPU is a Pentium 4 1600mhz, or so the bios reckons, but it feels slower than my old AMD 850mhz rig the littluns use.

Whats going on? Could it be that its like this just cos the thing is 2 years old and never had a good sort out? Or is BIOS reporting incorrectly?

I'm only concerned cos I'm switching it over to an o/c'd AMD 1700XP based system and I'd like to see a serious performance increase, spesh as she's paying for it.

Could be I'm worrying over nothing and half the problem is Packard Bell taking short cuts with rubbish video card/mobo and lack of memory.

Any ideas?

[GreenPiggy]

What are the other specs on it? It could have 128MB PC100 SDRam and the video might be onboard and stealing a load of it.
Also have you had a look for all the usual suspects, spyware viruses etc..

Also didn't early Pentium 4s have horrible latency problems with RDRam?

[DR]

Also sounds like it might be overheating.

[joshwa]

could be a dog slow hard drive with bad sectors?

[Nick]

Only had a breif look at it last night to see what needed to be saved before I switched bits of kit into the new case etc.

Had a quick peep inside and its got a separate video card, though it only looks like a 32meg at best.

Not sure on the amount of physical memory. Until I get home tonight I can't really give anymore info.

I'll just swap the bits over, re-install the OS on a clean drive and see what happens... might do 3Dmk2001se on the old one first to see what difference there is between the two, could be interesting.

[DR]

Check all the device IO drivers are installed.

[Nick]

Prolly not, its a ready built, pre-installed Packard Bell jobby.

I guess I'm just being a windy bugger and worrying over nowt. Still, a 3Dmark comparision should be interesting.