Computer slow, dropping connection.

Slaanesh

Hi,

We have a P4 - 1.3Ghz 512MB RAM, 2X72GB HD and 128K ISDN here in work. The problem we now face is that when we do any processsor intensive work such as editing of WAV files, encoding as MP3 etc, the computer goes alot slower than it used to. I think mainly because PC Peripherals changed the motherboard recently. Are there any motherboard BIOS settings I may have to set ?

As for the dropping of the internet connection, this has always been happening and I don't know why. After doing a stretch of work, the connection doesn't drop, it just doesn't transmit or recieve data. In order to get it to start working again the computer must be restarted. The operating system is Windows 98. Can't really change to another operating system.

Any ideas ?

Thanks,

Slaan

Ruu_Old

Try defragging the hard drive maybe, unloading unnecessary stuff, giving the registry a cleanout?
Ruu

Gerry

There aren't too many bios settings which will make a big difference, since you are talking about a major performance drop it must be something else. Perhaps they replaced the memory with sdram as well? This would be much slower than the rdram that was in the old motherboard. Get the latest chipset drivers, you will need to find out what chipset the board has first, look in device manager -> system devices.
I don't know why your connection is timing out, but I would really recommend you consider again if you can upgrade to windows 2000. Are you sure that your editing/encoding programs won't work on it? It is much better suited to heavy duty work if they do work on win2k, and they probably do.

Mr. Fancypants

Yep, first thing to check is the bios level. Download the latest bios and flash. Also, get the latest drivers for your ISDN adapter.

Typedef

Windows 95,98,Me & XP will always run slow because they are end user distrobutions.
If you are not going to use Linux, then use windows 2000 though in my experience even that is bloatware.

Ok, so your problem might be hardware, when your mobo got replaced it might have been replaced with something with an 'older bios version' but in practice if this board came from the same people you bought it from and it is the same brand, there is much of a muchness so long as the board works.

Advice I would give would probably centre around
[9x]
Clear out your startup folder
run msconfig and unload all of those unnecessary programs that get loaded at boot that you invariably never use
[nt-2k]
Same fix with the programs, but also try moving or reducing your pagefile ot another parition... in fact this goes for 9x too.

Encoding mp3's should be no hassel for a p4 1.6... I would describe the fantastic feats I have had my athlon 1.4 do that, put mp3 encoding to shame in Linux, but you would probably just say I was trolling so ... I guess I will leave it.

In my professional opinion from what you have said it sounds like you either have a load of programs running in the background eating cpu cycles ram and pagefile or due to fragmentation, lack of ram and general windows bloat your system is slowing down.

Solution remove any and all unnecessary programs from the windows startup prolog if you have difficulty with this repost ok.

Typedef.