Michael Wosnick wrote:

> Since I have made these changes to my system, the whole system seems to
> be slowed down noticeably. I notice a prolonged boot up compared to what
> it was prior to the adjustments. Program load times are noticeably
> longer (maybe 20-30%?).

Since you moved Zip drive to IDE1 with your harddisk, there will be a affect
on harddisk performance since Zip is very slow compare with harddisk. But it
shouldn't affect that much, there may be some settings Dell has adjusted to
boost system you just removed after the new config.

> The real big mystery is that my hard drive
> activity light seems to come on and stay on at times when there is no
> audible indication of any drive activity. Of course, normally when the
> HDD light comes on, you can HEAR the drive working.

This seems normal, on my home computer, the HDD active light flash every few
seconds.


> Is there some change I need to make in the Setup? Can
> anyone offer an explanation as to how I can get my system performance
> back to normal?

Try to move your CD-ROM to IDE1 as slave and zip drive to IDE2 as slave.
so you will have HDD --> IDE1 master, CDROM --> IDE1 slave, CDR --> IDE2
master, zip --> IDE2 slave. Also to check if "DMA" is enabled for harddisk.

If you have three 5" bay in that PC, you can place like this (from top to
buttom): CDR, Zip, CDROM, HDD. DO NOT put CDR and CDROM next to each other,
since they are both hot devices (especialy CDR), you may burn your CDR
(that's how my co-worker burned his first CDR). If you feel there is a heat
problem, simple leave the case open (not good looking, but most effective
way to solve heat problem).

The above config won't help you back to it was before (always put fast
device and slow device on different IDE cable), but it may be the best you
can do.

 If you like, you can set a fixed size page file to improve system
performance, depending on the size and free space on your harddisk, 400Mb is
a good number. To do so: right click on "My Computer" --> Properties
--Performance-->Virtual memory--> select "let me specify my own virtual
memory setting"--> set min and max size both to 400 ---> Clice OK--> close
Properties windows --> when windows asks to reboot, do so. The down side of
fixed size is it will always take 400Mb away from your harddisk, but you can
notice performance increase (I have set my home computer to 600Mb, and my
Networking instructor set a fixed 800Mb on his NT4 machine, he had a big
boost since then).

Jun Qian

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html