On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:30:57 -0800, "DaveW" <radiation@nuclear.org>
wrote:

>You just answered your own question. You are working with HUGE files that
>are swamping your RAM and forcing page outs to the harddrive. THAT will
>always slow your system to a crawl.


Since my prior post, I have been experimenting. I wanted to prove or
disprove that hardware, in particular RAM, was the culprit slowing me
down when I process a large set of JPEGs. So - I installed a copy of
XP SP2 on a spare hard drive, added only the drivers and software to
adapt XP to my computer plus the few applications involved in picture
processing. I also added AVGFREE.

Guess what? Things fly! Therefore I assume that my computer hardware
will suffice to do the job. The culprit(s) slowing me down with the
other hard drive surely must be the various other application(s)
running at the time I was processing my pictures. I went back and
tried eliminating many tasks co-running (in Task Manager), but nothing
seems to speed things up.

I may just continue doing my picture processing using the second hard
drive, since it does so well. I can and have set up the two hard
drives to be selectable at boot, so I can boot up whichever one I
want. I'll have to live with that, until I get another idea.

Thanks for helps

Gecko