Hi GuysI have recently bought and installed a Seagate 40G 7200 rpm HD to accompany my Fujitsu 20G 7200 rpm HD. My system as follows:Pre New HD:AMD Athlon XP2100+ASUS A7A266 Mainboard with ALi chipset20G 7200 rpm Fujitsu HD - Master (FAT32)Leadtek Nvidea Geforce2Ti 64 DDRWindows XP ProAfter new HD:AMD Athlon XP2100+ASUS A7A266 Mainboard with ALi chipset40G 7200 rpm Seagate HD - Master (NTFS)20G 7200 rpm Fujitsu HD - Slave (FAT32)Leadtek Nvidea Geforce2Ti 64 DDRWindows XP Pro - Service Pack 1I made the Seagate the master and the Fujitsu the slave. I formated the drive (NTFS) by using the built in software with the Windows XP Pro disk and proceeded to load Windows XP Pro and Service pack 1.Once everything was loaded I loaded the 40.72 Nvidea Drivers and ran 3D Mark 2001. I used to get 4800 but now am lucky if I get 4200. Everything else is the same - except I wasnt running the service pack initially with my Fujitsu and I was using FAT32.I have loaded all the drivers for my board once again, both the ALi AGP drivers as well as the ALi Integrated Drivers. I have also found that the default Geforce drivers that Windows XP installs - 29.58's seem to be the quickest so I currently do not have any Nvidea drivers installed. When I did install them I found a decrease in performance :-(Can anyone point me in a few directions that I should be looking to increase performance - I used to be able to maintain a locked 20fps in FS2002 easily - not anymore. On a lighter note - My new Ati Radeon 9700 Pro should arrive in two weeks - The only concern I have is that if there is something wrong with my system then I dont want it to negatively affect the performance of my new card...Thanks in advance, Rob FAJS

Welcome to Service Pack 1. I'm sure there are some people who will tell you that they saw no drop in performance after installing SP1. I wish I was one of them. It lasted all of about 2 hours on my system before I removed it. The majority of the service pack is security fixes.I would rather choose my updates than let bill and the boys do it. Sure there is Java virtual machine and USB2.0 support but both of these can be gotten from outside vendors or your motherboard manufacturers website. You didnt say why you left one HD as fat32. You really should be using both drives w the NTFS format. It allows for better disk space management as well as file security. Besides that should something happen your Fat32 drive will not be able to read your NTFS drive.My suggestion...Uninstall the service pack and convert the fat32 drive to NTFS. Also, you may want to put the Fujitsu as the master on your secondary IDE channel and your CD-ROM or burner as the slave. You may find it helps. It's also better to separate your optical drive from your boot drive for faster access speeds and more reliable disc burns if it's a burner.Bobby

Hi BobbyThanks a stack.I uninstalled SP1 but guess what...NO difference. THEN I remembered something I read about the Ali chips and Nivdia drivers later than 28 - something about them excluding agp within the registry. Looked in the registry and lo and behold - no agp enabled settings...Put in a new Binary String and- voila - 4800 3D Marks WOOHOONow I cant wait untill my new Ati Radeon 9700 Pro comes :-)One question though - I did two things - unintall SP1 and include a new string - should I re-install SP1 or not?Kind regards and thanks once again for your quick assistanceRobFAJS

Just an FYI regarding fat32 to NTFS conversion...DON'T DO IT...rather don't just use WinXP's convert command to do it. You need to reformat that FAT32 drive if indeed you want to convert. WinXP conversion will automatically convert to NTFS using 512 byte cluster sizes which will SLOW that nice fast HDD to a relative crawl. You really need to use 4k cluster sizes for optimal performance of NTFS (at least withing the realms of simple installs and not spending $69 on PartitionMagic8 which will allow larger cluster sizes at the expense of no defragmenting ability...not worth it IMO). If you reformat that HD to NTFS, windows will assign it 4k clusters (assuming it's over 2Gig in size) and disk performance will be MUCH better. Again...DON'T just use the convert NTFS command in XP!BTW - I just thought I'd try out NTFS since I have 2 Seagate Cheetah X15 15KRPM u160 HD and did a complete system reinstall. With Fat32 I had an optimal setting of 16k clusters for fastest performance (marginally less than 32K and saved a LOT of wasted space...and yes you CAN defrag larger FAT32 clusters, just not NTFS). Now using NTFS I get somewhat slower speeds. Can I tell? Only a little when loading apps. BUT...with FAT32 you WILL get the occasional "lost clusters" from hard locks or power failures...never get these with NTFS due to its design. So, I'll probably stick with it!Gino CP4 2.8Ghz at 3.1Ghz1G Samsung PC1066 RDRAMAsus P4T533-CGF4 Ti4400 with 43.35 DetsTurtle Beach Santa CruzLinksys NICAMI MegaRAID Elite 1600 SCSI RAID-0 with 2 Seagate Cheetah X15-36LPAdaptec 19160 driving PLEXTOR UltraPlex 40Max CD-ROMLian-Li PC65-BCornerStone P1450 19-inch and Viewsonic E773 17-inchCHPro USB Yoke and PedalsThrustmaster CougarGame Commander 2Win2000 SP3 using SCSI WriteCache fixDX9.0a

Hi Bobby,In my humble opinion, you really need to re-think the advice you give like the above. Security and bug fixes are of utmost importance to the vast majority: much more than a few points on benchmarks.SP1 is essential for the majority of users because it fixes so many security and bug problems. If you personally don't feel SP1 is worth an extremely slight performance hit on your machine, that of course is just fine, nobody should disuade you from your own choices. But giving blanket advice to people to avoid SP1 only causes more harm than good - fixing the holes in XP is much more important for the majority. Lets remember that most people we're talking to on this board are hard working, computer *users*, not tweakers. Indeed, if you desire to give advice from a strictly performance perspective, it'd be better if you specified individual hotfixes to apply and individual hotfixes to avoid - including any specific tweaks needed to keep performance optimal. Making blanket statesments such as avoiding SP1 is detrimental to average and advanced users all.Don't take this as a rant at you, just something I hope you might take into account. :-)TakeElrond ---Not enough bandwidth to display this signature! Don't reformat hard drive? (y/N)

Also, simultaneous access of master and slave is not possible with non-raid or scsi devices. While minimal, you will get better performance having your hard drives as masters on each ide channel, with you CD/zip/whatever as slaves...sg

Indeed, Serial ATA is/will eventually be a wonderful replacement for parallel IDE with its master/slave issues (even though the drive manufacturers don't seem to think so as yet).Good advice.Take care,Elrond ---Not enough bandwidth to display this signature! Don't reformat hard drive? (y/N)

Elrond,Not taken as a flame. If you notice though I stated that this was my opinion and that I do install security fixes and bugs. Just don't install the ones that are not really needed for each particular setup I put together. Your right that these are major issues but if you check around even system vendors have admitted seeing a slowdown and issues w certain configurations using SP1. It was a suggestion for him to try. If he was the one that showed an issue than he would have corrected his problem and reinstalled those security fixes and patches he wanted to. All your points are well taken though. Have a good holiday.BobbyP.S. I did make one mistake and that was a misuse of the word convert. I didn't mean to convert the drive from within windows. I should have stated that he reformat the drive using NTFS.

Hey Bobby,And in return, points well taken. If it seems I pay more attention to your posts and thus seem more critical of them, you won't be wrong. :-) The reason is: your system experience and knowledge is clearly evident. As a result, your posts have grown onto my somewhat short list of people I actively seek to read and learn from (and occasionally try to help and refine the advice you give when I might have an alternative perspective).Happy Easter to you as well my friend.Take care,Elrond---MS Flight Simulator Tips and TricksEnthused AVSIM Peon - with minor Bucket and Mop duties (they only let me roam near the AVSIM toilets!)