Wonder if the source of the problem could be narrowed down.

If you set up a folder on the p.c. hard drive and imported a batch of tracks to it, then imported those tracks into Hoster, I wonder if the results would be the same.

If it is still slow, then perhaps the processor would be the common denominator.

If they imported faster, then perhaps there's something in the USB trail causing the problem.

Dunno...just brainstorming.

I am going to try that later and see what happens. Will keep you posted.

I talked to a guy a dell today, and they told me that if you have the Toshiba HD mainly the 40gb drive, it is very slow. Any upgraded drive size from Toshiba will get you a Fujitsu or IBM drive in the system instead of the very slow Toshiba drives.

What size is the HD in the laptop? Didn't see this posted on your specs.

100 GB. I was actually told, I believe by somebody from Dell That they use Seagate

Is that even a factor?

A Maxtor outboard hard drive is being used to import from, not the inboard.

George

To find out for sure what your hard drive is. Go to the control panel and click on System, then click on hardware and then device manager, click the + sign beside disk drives and it will tell you what make of hard drive and the size you have.

Larry

It is a Seagate SATA. But isn't George right? I am importing from a Maxtor external.

I quess I got lost somewhere in the post. Are you importing mp3+g files from an external drive to the internal drive of the laptop?

Larry

Yes

When you say CPU usage shows no more than 2% is this while Hoster is importing or when you are not running any programs?

One item I haven't seen mentioned so far is Indexing. XP tries to create an index of all the files on every drive attached to the system. It will try to update that index every time the drive is attached. There is an option to turn this off in the properties for the drive.

You say software installed by Dell. What software are you referring to? Additional programs included with the laptop, such as Roxio? Or Dell's programs for keeping track of what your computer is doing (supposedly diagnostics) that can also eat up time?

I know my Dell and about every other computer I've had that came with Windows preloaded also had a ton of other crap preloaded and set to run on startup.
When I get a new computer now I always reload Windows before doing anything else to it.

Sam

I think I mentioned in an earlier post That I dsiabled everything that was running in the background. Hoster is running solo. The process statistic was while nothing is running. As far as indexing are you referring to autoplay? If so that was also disabled. I went to MusicXP.net and followed their guide to tuning a laptop to run for music applications.

Indexing is Windows XP reading the table of contents for every hard drive attached and indexing where on the drive each file is physically located. This does eat up time. Additionally there is no way you can turn off every process running, but as long as you have all of the known programs stopped then it should work.

Is there a way to shut indexing off?

Right click on drive, go to properties and uncheck box at bottom of the page for indexing.

I will give that a try. Thanks.

There must be more to it than that.

Thought I might need this for the future.

I went through My computer to get to the drives, right clicked on a drive,opened properties, and nothing about indexing mentioned.

Then I went through Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, DVD/CDRom drives, properties,checked each page there and no mention of indexing.

Using XP Home upgrade.

its on mine !

its in the general tab at the bottom.

Not on mine !

I checked 3 of my 4 computers didn't have it.

Larry