XP on an Eee PC (vs my old laptop)

[oshta]

How come the Eee PC with a 900mhz processor and 512mb of ram manages to run XP smoothly. Where as my laptop with a 1.6 P4 M and 512mb is pretty lag-tastic with XP.
- I mean, its useable for browsing etc, but its not nearly as quick as i might expect. By desktop only has a 1800+ Althlon in it (clocked to 1800mhz ish) and thats no problem at all, although it does have 2GB of ram.



Daniel

[dangel]

Perhaps it's the solid state drive?

[directhex]

How come an Atom-based netbook with XP on it is so much slower & clunkier than with Linux? Comparing an XP-based Eee to an Acer One here, the difference is huge!

[russelld]

Have you thought of trying a fresh install of XP on your laptop?

Unfortunately, Windows installations (esp laptops/desktops which see lots of software installs/upgrades, patches, driver changes, etc) always seem to deteriorate in speed and reliability.

Also - as RAM is so cheap - maybe consider an upgrade for your laptop. As you can see from your desktop, extra RAM can make a huge difference...

You may also find that the integrated graphics built into the Eee PC are faster than the graphics chipset you have in your laptop, so that may lend to the perception that the Eee PC is more responsive that an Eee PC....

Russell

[dangel]

How come an Atom-based netbook with XP on it is so much slower & clunkier than with Linux? Comparing an XP-based Eee to an Acer One here, the difference is huge!

Is that an SSD-based acer though? I heard the SSD is much slower than the eee's. XP on the eee (shockingly) good though.

[oshta]

Have you thought of trying a fresh install of XP on your laptop?

Also - as RAM is so cheap - maybe consider an upgrade for your laptop. As you can see from your desktop, extra RAM can make a huge difference...

You may also find that the integrated graphics built into the Eee PC are faster than the graphics chipset you have in your laptop, so that may lend to the perception that the Eee PC is more responsive

It is a fresh install!!
- Also, sadly, when i doubled the ram in the desktop (becuase i had some 1gb sticks about) is didnt make a massvie diffrence over the 2*256 it had before.

You might be right about the graphics however. Which i hadnt thought about.

Im just curious really, the lapton cost me £40 from another member on here and does all i needed it to do (emails when im on the narrowboat) so im not complaining too much!



Daniel

[jimbouk]

Could be a very slow spinning hdd. I know that's the limiting factor on my laptop which has a 1.8" hdd. What rpm have you got in the laptop?

[directhex]

Is that an SSD-based acer though? I heard the SSD is much slower than the eee's. XP on the eee (shockingly) good though.

comparing a disk-based XP on eee, to an SSD-based linux on the acer

[oshta]

Could be a very slow spinning hdd. I know that's the limiting factor on my laptop which has a 1.8" hdd. What rpm have you got in the laptop?

Yeah, well it is a 5400rpm drive, not sure of the data rate.
- I guess if i could pick up a newer 7200 drive for little money it would help speeds, and the cost of battery life.


Daniel

[Zadock]

It could just be that its getting on a bit, ware and tear?

Stick a nice legacy distro on there and give it a new lease of life: eLive, Xubuntu or Dream perhaps?

Stuck dream on a mates old HP laptop the other day, turned the sluggish old thing into a reasonably responsive and usable machine. Puppy also worked a treat to, we tried that first, lightning quick with that on.

[h0rk]

definately he solid state drive thats the influence here - they have an access time of less than 1 millisecond whereas hard drives - especially laptop ones are a lot more, your laptop hard drive will be around 10 milliseconds. loading windows is a lot of fast reads spread out over the disk, which is why the hard drive goes mad and you can hear it workind away loads when you start the pc up. a solid state doesnt have to move a mechanical head to the data, it has near instant access the any part of it, and this is why it is faster and smoother

[eloquence]

Reinstalling XP can help, as the OS seems to be good at accumulating cruft over time. However, if you have limited free disk space, then a good defragment of the hard drive may help. The first thing I'd do would be start up the Task Manager and see what's being used - CPU, virtual memory, etc. That'll give you pointers - if it's CPU then something's taking up the processor time, and you can perhaps uninstall something that's misbehaving. If it's virtual memory, then reducing background processes can help. If it's not that, then try things like defragmenting as that can slow down the startup of applications, etc rather a lot.

[Zadock]

Have you thought of trying a fresh install of XP on your laptop?

Unfortunately, Windows installations (esp laptops/desktops which see lots of software installs/upgrades, patches, driver changes, etc) always seem to deteriorate in speed and reliability.

Also - as RAM is so cheap - maybe consider an upgrade for your laptop. As you can see from your desktop, extra RAM can make a huge difference...

You may also find that the integrated graphics built into the Eee PC are faster than the graphics chipset you have in your laptop, so that may lend to the perception that the Eee PC is more responsive that an Eee PC....

Russell

I have found this with laptops that you would think would be more powerful than an Eee, was over at a mates last night. He has a Philips centrino based laptop with 1Gb of RAM and vista, the GFX chipset can't handle aero at all! but what surprised me the most was that his laptop couldn't run Frets on fire, even in minium detail at 640x480 and even my Eee can do that!

I've got Ubuntu 8.10 on my Eee now, all configured and its very responsive even with desktop effects at medium. there are still one or two bugs to be ironed out for the 901 but so far I'm very impressed I have a over 1.2Gb left on the 4Gb SSD, which is a lot more than I had with XP.