Andy:Are you saying that where the files to be transferred exceed the size of the available RAM, it will have to clear this when full (hence the stalling every so often?)?
But what about virtual RAM?
:|
OK things to consider
First lets cover RAM, XP with 1GB should be fine, although I like many have 2GB, the main use of RAM for the first 500MB is to load XP off the hard drive, cause RAM is obviously not limited by mechanical speeds (just the clock rate of the CPU)
Why have more than 512MB, it reduces/stops virtual disc swapping when running multiple applications, for instance email, browser, Word chew up memory, clearly if apps take an age to open it's down to XP taking a memory snap shot and swaping out to a reserved section on the hard disc to load you next app into RAM, I'd not expect transferring files speed to be down to this issue even if you were up in the 950MB RAM usage, unless you were moving very large files of 100MB's+ in size, due the the file buffer design within XP
Areas to look
Firstly did this problem start in the last few days?, if yes, have you installed any apps that are taking excessive CPU clock cycles (e.g. at the cost of the File System), every app gets a share of CPU clock time some get more priority than others dependant on this prioritisation, you can check this in Taskmanger, in typical system System Idle Process would be the highest at 99% even with office type apps running (only games tend to tax modern PC's), if you see svchost.exe running at high number this could possibly suggest the presence of a trojan or virus, or you may see a badly written app hogging CPU cycles effecting your file transfers
Where are you transferring from/to? if you have one physical disc split in to multiple partitions you are still using the same read/write heads, small files can be managed by the drive buffers, and larger by the File System buffering (NTFS is more efficient than FAT32), so moving very large files would drag performance down extra memory may not yield much benefit as the bottleneck is the drive, the cure is a second hard drive, the bottleneck moves elsewhere but might not be noticeable
You may have a 100GB of free space reported, but is it contiguous?, Windows is not particularly good at disc space management, so periodically running a defrag app can improve performance on drives as it reorders disc space into contiguous files that will load a lot faster thereafter
Less likely but may be woth looking at
If you have SATA drives this is not relevant, but older PATA (IDE drives) can use several methods of handshaking to talk to the IDE controller on the motherboard PIO, DMA, UDMA, found in the BIOS settings in that order, the latter yielding the best performance, if your BIOS dropped back to PIO mode I'd expect to see a massive hit on drive performance
Hopefully this reply may throw some light on the problem
There is another thread
http://www.talk.electricianforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3451 dealing with hits to system performance but may not be as you have decribed
If you can give me more detail I may be able to narrow this down
PS memory is very cheap at the moment, so you could throw more memory at the problem and see what happens, I'd consider a reformat at this stage as a last resort
