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PC Crawling - Any Help ???

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  • 28-08-2003 2:28pm
    #1
    Wesley Nervous Youth
    Registered Users Posts: 286 ✭✭ Wesley Nervous Youth


    Hi all-

    I've recently developed a problem with my PC (HP Pavilion 462; 768Mb Ram, 40Gb HD + 120Gb 2nd HD, 2.4GHz P4, XP Home). Several things happened over a week or two - I upgraded to Win XP SP1, downloaded some critical patches, boosted the ram from 256Mb to 768Mb, upgraded virus and firewall software (AVG Free and ZoneAlarm) and got connected with DSL. Only at the end of this, did I realise something was wrong.

    Booting up takes anywhere from 1-2 minutes now as opposed to 30 seconds before. Simple tasks like opening a small Word document cause simultaneous tasks (such as mp3 playback) to stutter and distort. I ran SiSoft Sandra's disk benchmarking utility and got transfer rates reported at 2684kb/sec, a tenth of what they should be according to the comparison chart.

    Needless to say, I have swept for viruses and all is clear according to the latest updates. There are no apparent problems I can find in Device Manager and uninstalling the extra disk, RAM, SP1 and deactivating the virus checker has had no effect on response times.

    I'm guessing that either the old drive or the IDE controller are at fault but XP doesn't think so and I can't understand how the drive can still be useable... unless it is considerately giving me an opportunity to backup everything before it does finally die.

    I'm by no means an expert at all this - does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on diagnostics or whatever? Failing that, does anyone know if the PC World 'PC Clinic' is any good... ?


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    #2
    Wesley Nervous Youth
    Registered Users Posts: 286 ✭✭ Wesley Nervous Youth


    Further to the above... running the diagnostic on the new drive returns a reasonably average performance for its specification (37000kb/s).


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    #3
    dieselfreak
    Registered Users Posts: 77 ✭✭dieselfreak


    Try turning off the Anti Virus...

    Its the most likely peice of software to slow down any system. If perfromance improves with the AV off, then try tweaking the settings eg. disable scanning "all files", this will have large impact on performance.

    Also have you monitored the processes with the taskmanger ?? Is an individual process hogging the system??

    check also for spyware, using AdAware..

    www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware


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    #4
    elexes
    Registered Users Posts: 4,471 ✭✭✭elexes


    had a problom like this turned out to be the ram chips . try different ram ?


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    #5
    Wesley Nervous Youth
    Registered Users Posts: 286 ✭✭ Wesley Nervous Youth


    Hi all -

    Thx for the advice. Fixed the problem now - it turned out to be much more bizarre. Apparently XP has a "feature" whereby if it encounters more than a trigger number of crc errors (6 I think), it rolls back the drive DMA setting. Without letting you know. My primary disk had been reduced from DMA 5 to PIO somehow; unfortunately, even using Microsoft's own advice to reset it didn't work. The solution was to uninstall the Primary IDE controller, boot up, allow it to be detected as new hardware, reboot again and - lo and behold - the HDD is full restored.

    Weird, weird problem. The disk itself is a reasonably well-behaved Western Digital drive which passed all the diagnostic tests I could put it through. But what they all had in common was that they ran off boot disks, thereby bypassing XP's PIO setting. Isn't XP grand?


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