There is a new computer in the house
by Volker Weber
Friday night I moved all of the data and some remaining applications from Ute's old Samsung Q10 to the new Dell X300. They are both very similar but the Dell has a nicer finish. The new machine is faster, has a larger disk, and adds Bluetooth as well as an SD slot. Both come in handy when connecting to the XDA2 smart phone.
The biggest change however is going from a custom Windows 2000 build to a supported XP build which adds her machine to the standard company environment. And I found this build to be very well done. The machine is quick to boot, although it has an encrypted disk as well as a virus shield, a firewall, and a VPN. I have seen much worse at other companies.
Comments
Hm, I always found Windows XP to boot pleasingly fast and quick right after a fresh install, but unfortunately this fades away rather quickly. Admitted, this effect is sped up by mutliple "play around with" sessions, but I've also seen it with other machines I manage and the users of those certainly don't mess with anything I put on there ;-).
Agreed; my work PC is similar in set-up to the one Volker mentions: Win XP Pro, VPN, disk encryption, firewall and virus shield. When the PC is “freshly imaged” it’s good and fast. This fades after approximately three weeks.
I guess this mainly down to new software being constantly pushed down on to our machines from the corporate network, in addition to the extra stuff I have to install as a developer.
It’s just a shame that the platform can’t cope with additional software installations like this — that’s what computers are partly designed to do isn’t it? :o)
the "xp slowdown after some time" problem results most probably in an activated system restore feature.
my computer -> properties -> system restore -> check the checkbox to turn it off.
system restore is a "neat feature" that tries to set restore points whenever possible. thus reserving 10% of each harddrives capacity for restore information. since harddrives are nowadays rather large this can mean up to 30gb of restore data that is permanently read and written.
this slows down xp dramatically.
you can just turn off system restore for better performance - with the cost of being nomore able to restore the system to some prior restore point. but there is better software available for such things ;)
