I got my TR1 in Germany in July and it was really slow. I expanded
the factory 256 MB to 768 MB (after finally getting the RAM shipped
over from the US) and it is still just as slow.

But it doesn’t appear to be with anything other than the hard drive.
When I boot up and first open the explorer, then click on the icon to
open and display the contents of the D partition, it takes a good 10
seconds of the hard drive spinning before it can even display
anything, showing a totally blank window first.

Here’s a simple test that shows what I mean: I open the C window,
where I only have system files, select everything (ctrl-A) and then
select properties. The drive spins and spins, while the “size”
indicator grows slowly, taking a full 16 seconds to tell me it found
3.3 GB! It takes even longer when I check the size of larger data or
program folders…

Now, I know the ultra small Toshiba drives aren’t as fast as the
regular laptop drives. But are they also that much slower? Or is mine
defective? I mean, mine is really painfully slow—even my 750 MHz
Dell L400 with 256 MB (which I replaced with this notebook) kicks the
TR1’s butt.

I would really appreciate any help/comments…
Eric

First of all, simply adding memory to a system won’t make it faster. It will only be faster or most responsive if you’re working with applications that use a lot of memory and force virtual memory to kick in. At any rate, with your 768MB of memory, you should more than covered for most apps.

I suspect that you might have a defective drive or some sort of process running in the background that’s hogging CPU cycles. Check the task manager to see if you have any rogue apps keeping your system from running smooth.

And if you do run the properties of a large group of files it can take can a while to get the size. Even faster drives have this problem. It depends on how many files you’re trying to look at. If it’s 20,000+ files in a directory or group of directories, it will take a while. I have noticed that once you’ve found the properties, subsequent searches are faster. Still, it is a little slower than normal. You can blame the slower rotational speed (4200RPM) and the relatively small cache (2MB) for the lag.

Well, fear not…Windows XP will slowly get faster over some time because it will adapt to your habits and optimize the file system for your usage.

In straight benchmarks, the drive may seem slow but when I’m working with most apps, the disk speed really isn’t a problem.

my 2 cents

You can add all the memory you want to the machine. It’s not going to speed up the hard drive any. It’s like adding a bigger engine to your car and hoping the handling will improve. The “select all directories and get properties” test isn’t a good hard drive test. The time on that can vary wildly depending on the number of files and directories on the drive even more than the drive speed. I have multiple web-browsing profiles and browsers on my TR, so it can take over a minute to add up the 60,000+ files on the C drive. On the other hand, I can pull up directories of 15,000 files (temporary internet files on my main browsing account) it comes up in less than 5 seconds. Unless it’s hampering your work in the real world, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.