lets see now *thinkin cap on*
your p2 350 will effect your overall boot time thats for sure... how much is debatable.
i found that going from 64 to 128 mb ram reduced boot times a little... but it was most noticable playing games and stuff.
more ram is certainly better (to a point)
the operating system can occupy a significant chunk of memory, around 64 for win98/me and around 100mb for my copy of win 2k.
so if i had 128mb of ram (which i dont) my hard drive may well start swapping before the OS is even loaded! thats bad for fast startups.
that 6.4gb 5400rpm drive will really be hampering the bootup time... if you insist on using it as your boot drive, move windows and program files to the start of the drive and keep it regularly defragmented.
what i also do with any windoze version i have used is to terminate and prevent from loading ANYTHING i dont use... task scheduler, soundblaster system tray gizmos, eax icon, antiviral TSR's... the lot.
so when i bootup win2k all i have is the speaker icon, my cure for cancer monitor and program, geforce tweak & overclocking utility and motherboard monitor.
moving on... you had a wrong comment in there.
your 7200rpm drive does run at the speed of your slowest drive, it will always run at 7200rpm!
however if it is a newer ata66 or ata100 drive you are undoubtedly running it on a ata33 drive interface with a 40wire ata cable... thus the drive will only have a max transfer rate of ata33... somewhat hampering it from attaining max performance.
however, it WILL be significantly faster than your 5400rpm drive.
i did the same a while ago. p2-300, ata33 interface, and i hooked up a ibm 60gxp ata100. while it didnt perform to its max, it still spanked the old drive for performance. (faster spinning, higher data density, more hdd cache, faster reads & writes, lower seek times)
so i suggest if you can make the 15gb drive your boot drive. thats the best thing u can do with your PC to make it boot faster.
next up... dos... dos??? whats that??? lol (been using win2k for too long now)
try to keep your autoexec & config as clean and small as possible. let windows handle as much as it can.
just remember the more stuff you have on windows the slower it goes. im talking about both stuff that loads into memory AND total number of available games/apps etc. they all ad to the, no. of folders, files & icons & registry size and complexity that widnows has to look at.
invest in some program that optimises the registry too. norton utilities is pretty decent for that, if you use win98.
right... fingers worn out... must stop
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