Where's the lag coming from?

[ShawnD1]

I realize that a lot of the computer's speed relies on the speed of the hard drive. This being the case, I have a little 6gb hard drive acting as sort of a buffer I guess you could say for files downloading off Kazaa. The files download onto the 6gb hard drive and when they are done, I transfer them into the big hard drive in the proper folder. The system is intended to reduce lag by having the small hard drive work very hard but the hard drive with all the programs stays fairly idle and ready for action.

Ok now, the problem is that the system really dies in terms of speed when downloading lots of files at once. If the big hard drive which runs all programs (including windows) is not being used much, then why does the system act like it is? If I try to open something like Outlook, it takes a significant amount of time to open it. The CPU is not running at 100%, there is no shortage of ram (512mb) and the pagefile is on the big hard drive so none of those are the problem.
Anybody have any ideas?

300W PSU (maybe not enough powa?)
AthlonXP 1700+
512mb ram
both hard drives are 5400RPM
KT266A chipset (gigabyte motherboard)
Windows 2000 Pro

that 5400 rpm can slow you down.....

is there any kind of chipset drivers out?

well the problem with your theory is that the system caches all the necessary info on the larger hdd since its the one using the OS and then it transfers to the small drive...you basically run the same operation in reverse. All the downloaded info is cached on the large drive before being written on the smaller one. So your not really saving yourself anything.

btw whats your total available physical memory its not going to be 512mb

[ShawnD1]

Physical Memory (K)
Total 523760

And GZ, I never download BIOS or chipset updates anymore because the last 2 times I did that, my computer would no longer boot and I had to send the damn thing in under warranty.

what model do you have?

and i never mentioned anything about a bios update....

Originally posted by ShawnD1
[B]Physical Memory (K)
Total 523760

no no your thats your memory amount thats is there yes but not the total thats available for usage...as for d/l chipset drivers and such thats up to you but its always a good idea. But its not likely to speed anything up.. Check the setting on your swap file as well it may be set a lil on the low side.

[ShawnD1]

The swap file is 2gb.