[agander]

I installed xbmc on an old desktop I had lying around...

1.8Ghz AMD Sempron 3100+
705Mb RAM
Win XP

I have roughly 16GB of music (probably 4000 songs, maybe 200 different artists).

I have it turned on for maybe 4 hours a day, and it's been scanning media content for about 3 days now.

Also, it jumps up pretty frequently and uses 100% of the CPU. I can go through menus pretty quick, but the background takes quite a while to load (i.e. I'm on the videos tab, and the music background will still be up).

I'm really not running anything else on there except for XP. I am using the Android remote, if that means anything.

Does this sound remotely normal? If it is, any tips on how to improve performance?

[agander]

And if it makes any difference, I upgraded the video card to a Radeon 9250, for HD through the DVI, but have it set on 720 rather than 1080.

[PatK]

You know that XBMC on WinXP doesn't support hardware acceleration even if your graphic card is capable. A Sempron is a cut down chip and will definitely have issues with graphics while your gfx card lays back and watches. Regardless 3 days of scanning doesn't sound right... it's probably caching images. Stick with the basic images that come with the skin would help. Run process explorer in the background to find what is using up your CPU (it's probably XBMC, but it might be something like an internet update) Consider Win7 or Ubuntu the hardware acceleration might be worth the switch...

A few questions that might help: version of XBMC, HD and pagefile size, have you tried any other versions of XBMC?

Covers and backgrounds on 4000+ of anything is a bit to run through.