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20 gb hard drive suddenly really slow

D

dr wily

Senior member
Q 1: Ive been running this rig for about 3 years now. Its got a 20 gig maxtor drive and a MSI socket 370 with a p3 600 OC to 800 on 2 128 matched sticks off ECC micron ram. I recently got a 120 gig hd and got rid of win2k in favor of xp and was running it for awhile until it did a crap out in which i reinstalled the OS. see q 3 for more info too

I dont know if this happened before or after but now whenever i load any program say outlook it takes an excruciatingly long time to do so. I check the task manager and it loads like 2 megs a second, so hitting explorer and outlook prompts me to go do the dishes now 😛

Whats the deal? Is it my ram, my hd, or my OS?

Q 2: Im just about to go in and replace this with a athlon xp combo if i cant figure it out. So i have another question: This rig is in an antec case that looks near identical to the Performance ones still on the website with a 300 W power supply, you think an xp would run on it? --TRYING IT OUT!!

Q 3: Ive got a maxtor ata 66 20 gb hard drive in a via 133 board and recently put in a second 120 gb drive (ata100) on the slave side of the same channel. I heard if you put a hd with a cd drive on the same ide channel that the hd would only run at ata 33. What happens when you have 2 hds on the same channel? do they split the bandwidth? that might be a reason my hd takes so long to load anything.. the hd light is always on but the proc usage is low and the ram is avail... help?

thanks guys
wily
 
Do the programs run fine once loaded? You might want to check your memory usage, 256mb is just cutting it for XP. Also check the sizes of your swap files, although I think XP handles this anyway. Also what gives you the 2mb a second figure? Is your CPU maxing out constantly? See if it seems to be idling unusually high etc.

As for the PS, sorry I can't help with that, I've never looked at those cases.
 
thanks for the reply
i was looking at the task manager processes tab and then opened a program
they actually hang @ 80k for a couple seconds then load on up at about 2 meg/sec
so explorer takes about 10 sec to open

the memory swap file is set at the default of like 384 megs and when xp is loaded its only taking up about 100 megs so i got about 160 free..
 
oh and i figured it out.. its an antec sx830 case with a antec 300 W 303x power supply.. on the website it says its P4 and amd compatible but any experience with althon xp's out there??
 
that 300 watt will work just fine with athlon xp's. It should be fine with up to 2 cd drives and 2 hard drives.
Any more than that will probably need a 350 or higher. I use AGI and Antec 300watts for builds and they work
fine with XP's.
good luck! 🙂
 
thanks!
ill be using an overclocked xp 2100 and one or 2 hard drives and a cd drive, if that dont work i guess ill invest in a nice quiet antec sonata. It will match the vantec aeroflow quiet HS/FAN i bought 🙂

One more question posted..
 
i figured out that it is the hard drive.. i installed a like program on both drives and the 120gb is leagues faster loading it.. anyone out there know a good diagnostic tool thats free to figure out why my hd is suddenly so slow??
 
Have you cleaned out your USER Temp file lately?
(Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp)
Local settings is normally a hidden directory so you will need to unhide it.

You may also want to check the WINNT TEMP directory.

Than run ERROR Checking.
(right-click My Computer\Properties\Tools\Error-checking

Also, running overclocked is good for corrupting data on a hard drive.

 
thanks for the help, but my 120 gig on the same ide channel is running peachy so i dont think its a overclocking issue (even running at 1.5v which is .1 or .2 less than stock for 3 years)
whats this maxblast thing? the link is adaptec drivers, someone care to explain?
ive been spending the last couple days moving my files to the 120 at excruciating rates, like worse than broadband.. 😛
 
gee well whatddayaknow after creating a maxblast boot diskette and booting with it it gives an error that files are nested too deep or something.. pretty dumb, will try the adaptec thing tonight
 
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