XP excruciatingly slow on iMacs

[toru173]

I have two low-end iMacs (each 1.8ghz, each 512 mb) - the only difference is one has the x1600, the other the gma950. Both are painfully slow under xp (bootcamp). I've used computers with much lower spec before, and even these aren't so painful. As an example my server runs xp professional sp2 on a 700mhz p3, and it's still faster. I haven't done any objective tests, but programs take ages to load, windows takes forever to load and things are generally "slow" to the eye.

I don't want this to turn into a windows bashing excercise, and I am investigating moving both iMacs to parallels + OSX instead of windows so that windows only programs can still be run. No "Forget windows, it's always slow" responses please.

My question is this: Has anyone else experienced similar problems? One machine I could understand - it's absolutely chock full of anti-spyware, antivirus and firewall utilities. The other has almost nothing running, and I did a thorough scan to check that there is no malware causing it to screw up. Has anyone else experienced slowness? I may format one or both of the machines to see if performance increases.

Thoughts please ^_^

[Stadsport]

The only problem I've ever experienced in terms of slowness on Windows (on my MacBook) is on the "welcome" screen, it used to like to hang for a minute or two, but I've had other windows machines do the same thing, so it never really bothered me too much.

If you've got a lot of anti-virus, anti-adware/spyware stuff, that can all be bogging it down. What's your processes list look like?

[Eidorian]

it's absolutely chock full of anti-spyware, antivirus and firewall utilities. I think I found the problem. How many processes are running?

[toru173]

The process list in that one is monsterous, and I noted this. What I can't explain is the other imac, which has even slower performance with much less going on.

[Eidorian]

The process list in that one is monsterous, and I noted this. What I can't explain is the other imac, which has even slower performance with much less going on.The number of processes would help.

[jdechko]

...each 1.8ghz, each 512 mb...

There's your problem. Windows XP + AV + Anti-Spyware/Adware + Pop-up blocker will take up a ton of RAM on its own. Look into putting at least a gig total and you should be doing much better.

As for the second mac (assuming it's the one with the GMA950) remember that you actually lose ~64 MB of RAM right off the top.