First post, by QBiN
- Rank
- Oldbie
So I've been disappointed lately with the performance of my PIII-1.4S on WinXP lately. Specifically, mysterious services eat up CPU, and random processes eat up both CPU and memory rendering the desktop experience a shadow of it's former self. Here are the specs:
ASUS TUSL2-C
PIII 1.4S Tualatin
512MB RAM
40GB HDD (Western Digital "JB" special edition)
SB Live-24bit (temp until to SB Audigy)
Geforce4 Ti-4600
WinXP-SP3
This used to scream and even be quicker to boot than my P4-2.8 Northwood. But I think I've let it do one too many Windows Updates. It seems like "recent" Windows updates have rendered the machine pretty slow. I blame Security Essentials and IE mostly. It seems like the original WinXP memory footprint back in 2001/2002 was ok with 512MB of RAM. However, years of patches/updates seem to have caused a fair amount of bloat.
My question is, should I just re-install XP and keep the software roughly '01/'02 era? Or should I give up on WinXP on this Tually and just revert to Win98SE?
My gut says it'll take some discipline to keep WinXP manageably speedy with 512MB anymore but should be do-able with a fresh start. It's just a shame that the i815 chipset can't recognize more than 512MB. I'm a fan of Win98 for era correct machines, but it seems like a step backwards to me for this Tualatin. I'm not sure I'm being objective enough in my thoughts about it though.
Thoughts? Advice?