One of the things that plagued me (not a major issue, but a real
annoyance), was that whenever I minimized Mozilla, and tried to restore
a previously minimized app, I had a 4 or 5 second delay. The system
worked well otherwise, and was solid as a rock, but that really annoyed
me. I am running Windows 2000 on a K6-450 with 256MB RAM, and a 32MB ATI
All-in-Wonder Pro AGP. Not a state of the art CPU, but the machine's
really no slouch either. In any case, I started wondering . . the HD's
in this box have always been running in PIO mode with the default WIN2K
IDE drivers. So, finally tonight, I gave the latest VIA 4.32 drivers a
shot, and installed the IDE busmaster driver. For starters, the system
loads Windows in about one third the time - really! And, no more lag
time, when minimizing Mozilla and switching between applications.
I'm posting this here, because Mozilla was really the only application
that exhibited this symptom on my box. I never really considered it
sluggish before (though I know it was now), but this made a dramatic
difference in Mozilla performance as far as I'm concerned. So, if you're
system has a VIA chipset, and you do NOT have UDMA enabled, this
definitely affects Mozilla performance even if you see no issues
otherwise with the system.
FWIW, my motherboard is a Soyo-5EHM with the ETEQ (same as VIA) chipset.
Mark
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e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
