I may not have expressed myself clearly enough. The original amount of RAM was 256 mb, available RAM was about 128 and pagefile usage below 160. So the paging file was about half of the amount of RAM, not double. And yet only half of the total amount of RAM was in use. And the trend continued when I doubled the RAM and pagefile plus added an antivirus program.
I was trying to say it was astonishingly fast for the specs.
Which leads me to another question: When clocking the boot time, do you have all startup programs disabled? My two minutes includes at least antivirus up and running. I work with ordinary people's computers. People like your granny: Having an icon on desktop saying "Internet" and another "Mail". People who say they can't access the 'net while in fact their computer won't boot at all. I have to speak to them with terms from hand plough era to make them understand anything computer related...
yeah i read the first line wrong...
by startup programs are you talking about something besides anti-virus? some anti-virus can be set to initialize after all essential windows processes so it doesn't interfere during the boot process. if you have a usb printer attached and/or printer monitoring program installed, that will slow the boot time down regardless.
tc are you attributing most of the slow down to the 5400 rpm hard drive? not sure i agree with that 100% but definitely the combination of low speed cpu, minimal amount of low speed ram and that 5400 rpm hard drive would all be contributors. i've got a dell running a 2.4ghz celeron with 2gb ddr333 ram and windows xp pro sp3 loaded on a 40gb 5400 rpm primary drive, and it gets to the desktop idle in less than 60 seconds, anti-virus included. very little optimization tweaking to the os.
