I have Win XP loaded on my desktop and have 1 laptop with Win ME and 1 with Win 98. Here is the problem. I just bought a Linksys 4 port Ethernet Cable/DSL Router and hooked it up without a cable modem connection (plan on getting cable access soon). For now its just a hub. I connected all 3 machine to the hub and got them all to see eachother. On my Win ME machine I have a folder that is 650MB. From my Win 98 machine I browsed to the Win ME machine and copied the files and it took around 8 min. Now I did the same thing on my XP machine. On my XP machine I browsed to my Win ME machine and copy the same folder. This time it takes abour 30 min!!! WHY????? and what can I do about this? Shouldn't it be the same speed? I've forced the XP machines NIC to 100MB/Full Duplex and very little improvement. TCP/IP is on all and NetBeui on the 98 and ME machine. Do I need Netbeui on the XP machine?

Well, what can I say. XP is very slow if you compare it to 98/ME/2000...

no xp isnt any slower than those i belive. my problem with xp has been the NTFS file system if u have that on ur xp then maybe thats wats causin ur slow down. everyone says NTFS is faster thats completely not tru it doesnt compare to FAT32 except in defrag

I agree with the comment that windows xp is very slow. We've just replaced several pc's which had windows 98 on, ranging from 233Mhz to 1Ghz. These have been replaced with 1.6Ghz P4's with windows XP Pro. The users of these machines all agree that even the 233 Mhz machines were faster ! . I timed Internet Explorers loading time on my PC and it varies from as much as 10 seconds (yes read that again - 10 seconds) down to almost zero seconds (due to cache I assume). This is just to load the app not to actually get the page displayed. This situation is common for all the programs on these PC's. What the heck is the problem, surely Microsoft can't have made such a huge cockup. Anyway, If you have the option, stick with 98, I see no essential features in XP that aren't in 98.

yes I concur with the views expressed above. win xp is much slower than win 98. i have a pentium 4 1.5 speed loaded xp and a pentium 2 333 speed loaded win 98. I notice the difference in speed.

The problem is the NTFS on drive C. I was getting 4MB/sec trasfer rates with an ATA-100. Under XP with FAT32 and Win 98 it's 20MB/sec. Other drives D, E, F are NOT affected by the speed. Someone messed up badly somewhere.