Poor performance in XP on new Mini

[Eric-PTEK]

I'm having what I'd consider poor performance on the new 2ghz Mini in XP.

I get non-responsiveness when moving large files across the network and it just is slow overall.

Its slower than my previous 1.8ghz Mini.

The standard MS drivers for the SATA controller are installed even though I ran the Bootcamp install, does anyone else show the Nvidia SATA controller driver installed? That is usually the biggest cause on non-Intel chipsets, the default MS driver for the SATA controller...I was just going to install Forceware and see what happens but wondered what other people show in Device Manager.

I get a lack of response from Remote Desktop, and after several hours of high network traffic it just stops responding to the network period.

OSx I'm not sure about because I rarely use it but I did boot it up to do some surfing in Safari and found its response time to be slow.

 

[txnoob]

That's odd. I Did standard boot camp install and my XP Pro SP2 install is FASTER than OS X. Not by much but definitely zippier. I'll boot up to XP and let you know about the SATA driver.

The funniest thing is that you bought a Mini and then rarely use OS X.

 

[Eric-PTEK]

I bought the Mini for 3 reasons. One is a lot of the data recovery software I run does will not run under Vista. Second I already have 6 machines in the office and I didn't need to be knocking into as I do now. Lastly figured it woudn't hurt to have a Mac around just in case. I run a small business IT solutions company mostly dealing with terminal services, virtualization, .net and ASP application developement, etc...so we do need to verify somethings on a Mac.

I'm not a big OSx user and I would use it more except for VNC sucks for response time and I use almost everything remotely. I can use it via my KVM but I didn't flip for a DVI KVM when I should have, looks poor over analog.

Plus it fit on top of my KVM and looks like it belongs there:

I tried to install the drivers for the 9400 chipset from Ndivia and it says no compatible hardware found...time to go looking for the SATA drivers inside the package.

 

[azdunerat]

Umm how much ram do you have in the mini??

 

[txnoob]

Okay, understand your use of the mini now. I'm on the XP side now, again. Noting very good performance and registering 2.72GB of Ram. SATA is Microsoft generic driver.

 

[Eric-PTEK]

Just the gig it shipped with which is more than enough for XP on what I'm doing.

I looked up DDR3 prices today, it'll be getting 4 gigs in a week or so when it arrives.

Its slower than my D620 Dell which is only a 1.8ghz core duo, not even a Core 2.

Even on the OSx side it doesn't really impress me but then again I'm not an OSx person and I didn't expect this box to do everything.

I just know its not right...maybe I'll dump it and start over, see what I get.

 

[post/ergo]

That 1GB of RAM in the Mini equals 896MB that the system can use due to the integrated graphics so that would be hold things up with large file transfers, I would posit that with the 4GB (hope you're running 64-bit XP ) you will see a performance boost.

If however the RAM upgrade does not speed up the unit then the issue may be deeper and you need a replacement, through I'm not sure Apple will accept "Poor performance under Windows" as a reason for a return, however if OS X does not speed up with it then you might have a case (I've never needed to return a Mac before so I have no experience in doing so. Intel server chassis on the other hand )

 

[belvdr]

You can still install the 4GB with 32-bit, but 32-bit Windows will only see a maximum of 3.6GB, after drivers and such.

That point aside, 800MB of usable RAM is more than sufficient for transferring files. This should not be happening with that setup.

 

[dwsolberg]

Something is wrong with your setup. Possibly there is some optimization or driver active that works with a PC but not a Mac. Try to re-install the bootcamp drivers from the DVD that Apple includes in the box. Try removing any third-party drivers that you may have installed. Also, if you have a pre-built Windows install you may have made some settings that you forgot about that are causing the problem. Also, check your available hard drive space. It's possible that not enough space is partitioned for Windows.

 

[Eric-PTEK]

800 megs is more than enough for XP.

I didn't load anything except for XP and the drivers, thats it.

Plenty of space for the partition and I used XP SP3 right off of Technet.

All this thing is a laptop in a tiny box...after seeing the other post about someone having an issue with gigabit ethernet and Nvidia's history of poor chipset implementations I'll chip it upto that for now.

I'll try to dig up the chipet drivers and change them out. If the SATA drives are being run in compatability mode, since it shows an standard IDE interface then that there is a huge problem for performance.

I don't suppose there is a way to get into the BIOS on this is there?