Windows XP wEEEirdness

[Guest WearTheFoxHat]

Ok, if you've been reading these forums, I've got the following:

Asus EEE PC 4GB 701, with 2GB RAM, 16GB SDHC, and a tiny Bluetooth dongle.

I had this running very nicely under Xandros (apart from couldn't get USB tethering, or bluetooth sharing to work). Therefore I decided to give up on my plans to "learn more linux", and go back to my Microsoft roots.

I backed up the EEE in case I wanted to go back to Xandros (especially after all the time I spent customising it).

• I installed XP to the 4GB SSD via a USB CD-ROM, using a Windows XP Pro CD which I had previously slipstreamed with SP2, and removed unwanted components using an unattended.txt install.
  
• Logged on as administrator, created my user account (with admin rights)
  
• Went into properties of the SDHC and made it "optimised for performance", assigned it a fixed drive letter "D", formatted it as NTFS.
  
• Removed the pagefile
  
• Disabled disk indexing for both SSD and SDHC drives
  
• Disabled System Restore
  
• Compressed C: drive
  
• Logged out.
  
• Logged in as the user, logged out
  
• Logged in as Administrator and moved the users documents and settings profile to the SDHC drive, and made the necessary registry changes.
  
• Logged back in as the user, profile working fine at new location.
  
• Logged in as Administrator in safe mode, and moved the DLLCACHE to the SDHC card.
  
• Deleted any windows update files
  
• Installed:
  
• Asus tools and utilities from DVD
  
• Microsoft Office 2007 (full install) to D: SDHC
  
• Configured my email as imap on outlook 2007 (profile stored on D: within Docs and settings)
  
• AVG antivirus to D: SDHC
  
• Activesync
  
• Toshiba Bluetooth Stack to D: SDHC
  
• WinRAR to D: SDHC
  
• eeectl - running at "Medium"
  
• Installed the scaled resolution fix and the systray application to change the res on the fly.
  
• Firefox Beta 3 to D: SDHC
  
• Opera 9.5 to D: SDHC
  
• Combined Community Codec Pack to D: SDHC
  
• Real Alternative to D: SDHC
  
• Ran all windows updates and office updates including Office SP1, Media Player 11 and IE 7.
  
• Installed the printer drivers for the HP PhotoSmart C5180 (Huge install for a printer driver ... to C drive ... as no choice)
  
• Skype to D: SDHC - Does not startup with windows
  
• Windows Live Messenger - Does not startup with windows
  
• I removed all unneccessary applications from starting in MSCONFIG
  

  • The system starts up ok, but is then amazingly sluggish in windows. I know its a small machine and not to expect quad core performance, but it is really slow! For example you can open any browser whether it is IE, Firefox or Opera and it will take over 30 seconds to open and then all seems ok. Yet when you try to type something into a box, it will do a few characters and then freeze temporarily while you keep typing.
    
  • I wondered if this was to do with compressing C drive, as it takes a few cpu cycles to uncompress things to run them ... so I uncompressed C drive, and still just as sluggish.
    

  Can anyone offer any insight as to where the problem may lie???

  (and please dont say "go back to linux!" ... because at present I am tempted, as it was blisteringly fast-ish!)

  -- Cross posted on MoDaCo's EeEasy.com forum, and eeeuser.com forum --