Just a question...

[arcanum]

Hi

I bought a family license about 2 years ago, and the main reason for that was that Jeremy is a one-man coder with an awesome support. Coders do it with a routine (hmm even chicks )

Seriously, im using XP with 4gb ram. Quite a typical setup. NOD32 for antivirus and im using bridged router, no hardware firewall here. Instead of that im using Outpost firewall.

All well, no probs with the virures etc.

However, when i install store copy game or any bigger softwares, my XP goes down when istalling. PL shows that game installer uses 3-5% cpu time which is typical. Is it about the HDD I/O rate? When installing Diablo 3, for example it is copying massive big file which causes massive I/O. That causes massive delay when for example using chrome browser at the same time.

Another example is that when i play CS GO and switch is to background to use chrome, it swaps about 30 sec. I know that CS GO use quite amount of memory, but 30 sec swapping is quite unbearable?

I found one XP tweak that "force xp core in ram". What is Jeremy's or Ben opinion of this?

Regards,
Arcanum from Scandinavia

[edkiefer]

I would say most definitely it is I/O bound , installers do a lot of copy/paste so it's heavy on HD .

You didn't mention rest of HW but more cores also can help here , I noticed when I jumped from dual core to quad core my copy/paste times more than 2x performance .
Since you don't want to slow down the install ,even though it might be brack ground process , I don't think there much you can do .

Unless system was working better at one time and now its slow (note as HD fills up it will slow down a bit ) .

Edit; you could try turning off AV while installing to see if that is affecting anything . then turn it back on after done .

[Jeremy Collake]

These issues are tricky. Could be any number of things.

It could be software related. Security software like NOD32 and firewall software like Outpost inject blocking hooks all over the system. Their real-time scanning can slow things down considerably.

If it's more a hardware bottleneck, you should use the Performance Monitor in XP (perfmon.exe).

You'll add counters like 'Memory - Page Faults/sec' to check to see the page faults occurring, which would indicate it is a RAM issue. There are counters for everything on your PC. Disks, network, CPU, everything. Almost too many. Right-click in the counters pane at the bottom to add them to the graph.

Once you thing you've found pretainent counters, keep an eye on them during these periods. Hopefully you'll get an idea of the bottleneck, then proceed from there.

I would guess it is certainly either memory or storage I/O, but you deduced as much.

Chances are the solution will be to buy faster storage (e.g. SSD) and/or add more RAM, and/or disable or dial-down real-time scanning.

[BenYeeHua]

Yup, you can try disable real-time protect, then copying big file(or installing) to see did the time reduced.
As system will cache the file by using the SuperFetch, so you may need to flush the cache or just restart for a better result.
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And ya, 4GB RAM is a serious issues when you are playing game while also opening the Chrome which like to bite RAM and also Page File(Chrome like to page the idle tabs data into Page File)...

Anyways, it should be I/O bound, it can be HDD or RAM, and even worst if your RAM is DDR2 if this computer is very old.
And if I am right, you also don't enable AHCI too, as Windows XP don't support it very well, and always causing strange issues for some Hard disk too.

If you don't want update the Windows or also whole computer hardware, then getting a SSD for yourself is a good choose too, but be aware that there are many type of SSD, don't buy too crappy one like TLC, MLC 3-bits or something...

I found one XP tweak that "force xp core in ram". What is Jeremy's or Ben opinion of this?

DisablePagingExecutive?
Nah, you really don't wanna do this, as Windows will loaded the huge 100-500 MB of Registry into the RAM, if you do that, it will fail to page into Page File, and causing much less memory to use...
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Anyways, like support said, SSD or RAM or Antivirus should be the bottleneck, and also upgrade your Windows if you can/want, Windows 8.1 might be a better choose, as it need less memory than Windows 7, but I guess it is better for using the money to buy a SSD or/and RAM....

[newuser]

If really getting an SSD, made it sure comes with a trim software that can run in windows xp. Usually its provided in the SSD website. And also the 4k aligment is very important, use a tool to align it, and also disable indexing.

As for TLC/MLC/etc, this is the field the expert above me can explain, I'm out.