On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 14:14:29 GMT, gecko <alpha@olympus.net>
wrote:

>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

Most things running in the background on a system don't take
much CPU time, rather they eat up a lot of the memory so you
have less available for the jobs you run, but you didn't
mention exactly what processing a large set of JPEGs
involves.

If the other background apps are heavily accessing the hard
drive that too could make a difference, but it seems
doubtful as you'd then notice the performance degradation in
many tasks not just this one.

You have not mentioned the particulars of your jobs nor the
specifics of the hardware, so we can't really say where the
weakest link is. From your comments above and the typical
scenarios, it seems likely you just need to add more memory
to the system. Looking at Task Manager you can also compare
on both Windows installations, how much memory is used and
available, and while running the image job you can see how
much memory it's using.