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Author Topic: Gateway 2000 P-75 Boot Up Speed Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 07-17-2003 02:03 PM                     I have about 6 of these boat anchors. As a sanity project, I took one of those machines and put a Promise Technology Ultra ATA-133 controller in it, and chanined a couple more drives to it. When the machine boots, naturally it goes through detecting the 3 hard drives and the CDROM drive, then loads the ATA controller and setects the two additional drives (one is a 15 gig and the other is a 120 gig) and then loads the operating system, all in 1 minute 20 seconds and she is "ready." Of course, the machine boots faster without the ATA-133 controller since it does not have to fiddle around loading it and detecting the drives on it. But yet, I take my old 500mhz, 400mhz, 133mhz and other boat anchor machines and the old Gateway just pulverize them in the time required for boot-up. I plan to use the Gateway for storage on my network. All it has is Windows 98SE in it. One would presume, under these conditions, it will boot quickly. It does that very impressively. Here's the twist! All the old P-133 Compaq we have at the radio station takes forever to load just the Operating System (win-95 or 98, depending on the machine) with no other programs installed. They practically crawl at some snail speed when someting like Microsoft Office 2000 is installed. But yet I can install the same stuff in the old Gateway P-75 machines, and they will just litterally beat the hell out of the Compaq's. I made one of the old Gateway 2000 machines into strictly a MS-DOS 6.22 machine for use with the Associated Press Dos-based program, since the old 386 we were using finally died. The AP people were graceful anough to come up and install the software and get it tweaked for our needs. Boot-up was like lightning speed. I turned the machine on, turned around and scratched my ass, and when I looked at the computer a couple of seconds later, it was waiting for me and ready to go. As compared to the old Compaq P-133 machines, those didn't even finish counting the wimpy RAM yet. Now, for a very stupid question: Why are these Gateway P-75 machines constantly beating practically everything we have under the same conditions? BTW, I am only using 64 Megs of RAM or less in the P-75's, and I have a combination of Maxtors, WD, Fugitsu, Conner, and some other crap I never heard of. They still beat the P-133 Compaq machines without anything installed except the OS. The idea of replacing the old Compaq P133's with Gateway 2000 P-75's is definately entertaining my mind. I have plenty of them. We are not going to buy new computers, I am fixing junk with better junk..that's just the way it is, and I have no other options.  |  IP: Logged Barry Floyd Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1079 From: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 07-17-2003 02:21 PM                        Paul, My very first "home computer" I ever bought was a Gateway 2000 P5-75. I bought in in February of 1994 or 95 (can't remember). It's still running like a top. Replaced the hard drive twice, but everything else is running great on 40 meg of Ram! In fact, it's the only machine we have at home that will run our voice mail software. The only thing we use the machine for is voice mail.  |  IP: Logged Jason Burroughs Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 654 From: Allen, TX Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-17-2003 03:45 PM                     Compaq computers especially those of that vintage are very proprietary. You may be running into a hardware conflict somewhere. Compaqs were pretty picky about what hardware you could stick in them. Gateway's on the other hand used primarily standard stock items, usally Motherboard directly from Intel etc.  |  IP: Logged Sean M. Grimes Expert Film Handler Posts: 247 From: Lunenburg, MA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 07-17-2003 03:54 PM                        a few things that I would check would be to go into the startup bios and clear out the advanced startup options if they have them... the ram check, auto drive detection. those two processes alone are not needed unless you daily change the ram amount and drive count. That can remove about 30 seconds from start up alone. Also check the autoexec.bat and config.sys files for unneeded subroutines, if the machines are just being used in win98 you can safely remove dos initialization of sound and mouse drivers just put a rem in front of them. Then in windows, right click on my computer to bring up properties, go to the last tab (I believe it's performance...) and in the first advanced menu you can uncheck the "check for floppy on startup" tab... that will remove ten seconds from windows startup... when there is a full "scan" of ram and "autodetect" of hard drives, you system will boot damn slowly.  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 07-17-2003 09:11 PM                     Jason, I checked for conflicts. There is none. It is just plain slow as molasses traveling downhill in Alaska's Brooks range. Those Compaq computers came from the University of Idaho as surplus obsolete property. They didn't run any better, some even ran slower. Sean, the autoexec.bat and config.sys is not present in our Compaq machines....They were all clean install of Win 95 and Win 98, depending on the machine. I'll take a peek at the BIOS again. I wonder if msconfig might help...and maybe I can turn off a bunch of crap that is not needed to run in the background. And yes, Barry...those Gateway 2000 P5-75 are great machines. They are practically bullet proof. They run so well that I made an effort to save them all from the scrap heap. They make excellent word processor machines, even with MSOFFICE 2000 Pro installed. They still run at a reasonable speed.  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-17-2003 11:45 PM                        Assuming a virgin OS install on each machine, I wouldn't be surprised if the speed differences related to the disks themselves or the disk controller (IDE or SCSI). A Windows boot process is I/O-bound, not CPU-bound, so the actual clock speed of the CPU shouldn't matter (much). What is so wrong with these machines that they need to be rebooted so frequently? Even Win95/98 will usually run for a day or two without crashing. (Meanwhile I'm typing this on a machine that has been up for over a year without a reboot.)  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 07-18-2003 01:16 AM                     Scott, they are just junk.  |  IP: Logged Ron Lacheur Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 650 From: British Columbia, Canada Registered: Feb 2002 posted 07-18-2003 06:04 AM                     Install windows2000 and you won't have to reboot your computer for weeks, provided everything is in working order.  |  IP: Logged Sam Hunter Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 779 From: West Monroe, LA, USA Registered: Jan 2002 posted 07-18-2003 10:14 AM                     Gateways are made with Pixie Dust Compaq's and Dells are made of  |  IP: Logged Paul G. Thompson The Weenie Man Posts: 4718 From: Mount Vernon WA USA Registered: Nov 2000 posted 07-18-2003 01:35 PM                     Ron, the drives in those Compaq machines of ours are so small (about 730 megs or so) they won't hold a game of Solitarie after Windows 98 SE clean install with all the security updates and MSOffice 2000 full bloated version are installed. I have had to remove the "toys" to have enough drive space to run some of the programs the sales staff needs. To add insult to injury, MSIE is a drive space hog. I don't have the expertise to remove MSIE, even though we no longer allow those machines on the internet. In this day and age, a 730 meg hard drive is good only for wiping your butt. Those old Compaq machines of ours are simply not worth upgrading. They belong in the trash bin.  |  IP: Logged

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