Apparently slow hard drive

[LazyGit]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my system entirely but kept the same hard drive albeit with a clean install of windows. It takes about 40 seconds for Windows to load after post on my e6600 (401x9) p5b-e plus with 2GB DDR6400, 8800gts. I don't run a ton of background processes, only the same as I had before on my A64 3200, nforce3 ultra, 1GB DDR3200, 6800 system. I'm sure windows used to load faster.

My hard drive is a 200GB sata150 drive. The mobo is set to auto detect. It's calling it an ide, is that correct? I told it to use ahci but it crashed on boot, is that a setting you only use for raid?

Load times in general seem just as slow or slower as they were on my last system, in fact loading a level in half life 2 seems to take longer as well come to think of it. Can anybody explain this or think of a remedy? I've put the drive in a different port and defined the PIO and udma settings myself and it still won't go faster.
cheers

 

[LazyGit]

Seriously. I would really appreciate some advice. What was left of my old system (identical bar the hard drive which can still only run at sata150) has been sold and when I checked it out it loaded windows in about 15 seconds. A 2.5 year old system is trouncing a brand new thousand pound system running at 3.6 GHz, that sounds wrong to me.

Thanks for any help.
cheers

 

[Zelvek]

What model of mobo do you have?

 

[LazyGit]

The Asus p5b-e plus, it's on the latest drivers too.

 

[btcomm1]

Well, you could try taking out PCI cards until it either speeds up significantly or till they are all gone, then you can disable differn't things, like wake on lan in the bios of your new motherboard or onboard things that you may or may not use and see if that makes it load a lot qucker.

You are saying that your old system that you sold boots up in 15 second? This one takes 40 seconds? Have you tried another SATA HD and loaded windows on it to see if it makes any difference?

Does it take longer to load once you see the Windows XP loading screen or is most of the difference in getting to the Windows XP loading screen?

Maybe you do not have fast boot on in your bios? Maybe this bios just takes longer to check everything? It has to check twice the amount of ram before it boots up.

 

[LazyGit]

The time I'm measuring is from when the XP loading screen appears to when I arrive at my desktop. I've downloaded PCMark05 and it's registering 7.55 MB/s for XP startup and 5.08 MB/s for HDD general usage, these numbers stack up fairly well compared to similar drives in the recent WD reviews so it looks as though it's not the hard drive after all. While loading XP it just seems to pause for a while so I'm guessingmaybe it's the different drivers I have on this system. I'm going to try uninstalling the sound drivers to see if that's the difference.
cheers