Windows XP Sluggish on Latitude E4300

So Windows 7 runs just fine, but I'd like to really have an decent XP machine. But I cant help but feel its SO slow. From the touchpad not being as smooth loading times for small things take forever etc. Seems as its missing something like a driver but its not.

Its set to SATA so its not that. And all drivers are installed. But XP runs smoothly on a computer from 2006 compared to what it does on this Latitude. with a P9400 core 2 duo with 4GB of ram

Any suggestions? I've installed Windows XP several times still same results.

Heck even CPU usage stays low and its not a resorce hog

 

In my experience, it is always use the computer with the OS it was manufactured originally to run with. XP does not make proper use of RAM and dual core or more core CPUs like Windows 7 and above do.

 

In its time you could buy it to be shipped with XP.

 

oh in that case, can you tell me what drivers did you use? Were you able to get the official Windows XP drivers for everything?

Sometimes having the latest drivers is not the best practice and if you can find the official XP drivers from the laptop manufacturer that would be great.

 

Yeah got them all directly from Dell.com for the exact model. Only difference is I used the latest Intel GMA graphics driver from Intel.

 

I would try uninstalling that and using the old official driver, it's not like the new driver is going to give you any added performance.

 

Yeah but I'm sure the graphics driver wouldnt cause it to act like its running on a bad hard drive. I've used the old one before several months ago when I tried XP.

 

Right, at this point, I can only advice you to upgrade to Windows 10. That's what I would do if I had your machine since it doesn't run like it is supposed to on XP

 

I'd just reload 7 on it lol. This laptop is NOT my main computer. Which my main build, I'm sticking with Windows 7 till support ends haha.

 

go with Zorin os9 lite if you want fast.

review

 

I dunno, a mismatched graphics driver can cause much reduced responsiveness. If you've ever ran XP with the default Microsoft graphics driver, you'll know what I mean. Going with the old driver from dell.com seems like a halfway decent shot. I know AMD and nVIDIA both discontinued GPU driver support for XP over a year ago, so I'd be surprised if Intel's latest drivers are at all optimized for XP.

The other thing that comes to mind that might cause XP to be noticeably slower on the same hardware, even after boot, is partitioning. If you have a 4K sector hard drive (most drives since mid-2011 or so), and partitioned it in XP, then the partitioning and the underlying 4K sectors on the disk won't line up, which can cause two disk reads/writes to be done wherever it should be one, and thus slow it down. It's for this reason that when I've installed XP lately, I always partition the disks from Vista first (since Vista's partitioning aligns with 4K disks), and then exit the Vista installer and install XP on the Vista-partitioned disks. Win7 ought to work as well as Vista for that, and you can exit the Win7 installer after partitioning and before burning a key. Nonetheless, I don't think this would be that noticeable in day-to-day activity - during bootup, it might add a bit of time, and during disk-heavy I/O you might notice it (particularly on an HDD), but probably not when, say, posting on NBR.

If you've got a Synaptics touchpad, as many Dells of that time did, you could also try the Synaptics touchpad drivers, which tend to be a bit newer than Dell's. I've had two-finger multi-touch a la Macintoshes on my XP-based Inspiron 1520 by going with Synaptics drivers instead of Dell's version of them. I personally found Dell's drivers to be a bit smoother for me, so I went back to them, but the Synaptics ones are worth a try if they made your touchpad.

Finally, you could always try some benchmarks to try to figure out which component is underperforming. If you get a really low score or benchmarks of a certain type won't run, that's probably where to look.

 

Try running a benchmark cpu, hdd, video, memory it should show where your bottleneck is, then check your cpu score with the link below.

https://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+SP9400+@+2.40GHz&id=978

John.