Almost there, need help

[NewbieD]

I have put everything together, but have a small issue. I am running windows XP, with SP3 and it is very slow, especially when booting up or installing software. When I try to open more than one window it is very sluggish. Here is my set up,

Motherboard: Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe Green nVIDIA Socket Am2 ATX
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 6000+ 3.0 GHz Processor
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2GB kit (1GBx2), 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-6400 Memory and Crucial 1Gb Kit (512Mbx2) Ddr2 800 Ballistix 240-Pin`
Graphics card: eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT 512MB DDR3 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card
Sound card:Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card
Hard Drive(s):2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Hard drives 500 GB SATA-300 - 7200 rpm

I am not running RAID, and have partioned the main HD with a 200GB for the Operating System.

Any suggestion of a setting I could check?

Thanks.
ND

[zburns]

My first build (recent) is hardware similar to yours, but I had no real problems and my system is fast. Same mobo, AMD 5600 CPU, 4 gig RAM, 8800GTS, Vista Ultimate.

I have several comments. Rob recently posted his BIOS settings for his M2N32 mobo. Did you follow his BIOS settings exactly? If not, I suggest you reset to his recommendations. Much of the M2N32 BIOS settings he used are the default settings and many of them are "auto" settings.

I have only one hard drive so the next thing I say, I have no direct experience but others on the forum can comment. How have you configured your two hard drives to work together. If I had two SATA hard drives, I assume I would have them in one of the RAID configurations.

Last if you have an antivirus installed, disable it, turn it off or uninstall it. If you are running Windows Defender, you should not have another sypware program installed. You should probably only have Windows Firewall running, no other firewall! Some comments on this site have not been kind to Norton security; slows you down.

Last comment. My video card was not initially recognized. My Windows Experience Index was very low, less than 2; when the card was recognized and I had a Nvidia driver downloaded, speed jumped to 5.3 -- so I would check this first. I assume XP has this feature -- Windows Experience Index -- it is a speed rating essentially. zburns

[RickyTick]

There appear to be some known issues with SP3 and AMD.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-XP-SP3,5334.html

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006932.html

http://www.newsfactor.com/news/Windows-XP-SP3-Problems-Reported/story.xhtml?story_id=03200037G76O

There's more, just google it.

[zburns]

I have something else. My M2N32-SLI Deluxe mobo "User Guide", on page 4-27, Section 4.4.5 Chipset (This is the BIOS settings part of the booklet). My guide lists seven settings beginning with "LinkBoost Function" and ends with "NB<->SB HT Width" -- I do not have a clue what they mean.

But my BIOS from the mobo had one additional setting "NVIDIA GPU Ex" -- this setting should be set to Auto. My book did not have this setting and Rob had not yet posted his BIOS on this website. My Video card was not recoginized and my system speed slow -- I had this setting set to Disabled -- I reset to Auto -- may have been the reason my card was not recognized. See all this on Rob's New Instruction Post (this section), page 6, under "Configure the BIOS Settings".

To see if your card is recognized,go to Device Manager, Display Adapters and the Video card should be named; if it is not there, I will bet that's the prob.

Comment on the 2 HDs. Since you are starting up, you could easily disconnect the second drive, red SATA cable and the power cable to be safe. Run on one drive, see if that helps. zburns

[NewbieD]

Did you follow his BIOS settings exactly? If not, I suggest you reset to his recommendations. How have you configured your two hard drives to work together. zburns

I double checked and I did follow the settings. I am not in a RAID because I wanted one HD specifically for family photos and such.
Thanks for your suggestions - I also reloaded my driver for my card, and ensured that the Nvdia was in auto.

ND

[NewbieD]

[QUOTE=RickyTick;9582]There appear to be some known issues with SP3 and AMD.QUOTE]

Thanks RT, I ended up having to load XP on the second of my drives, and have updated just to SP2. So far the problem has gone away, but I am going to continue to monitor closely.

Thanks,
ND