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Dual-core system is suddenly much slower, esp. when hard drive is overworked

M

MDesigner

Platinum Member
Something happened and I'm not sure what it is.. I had some RAM issues in which I determined 3 out of my 4 DIMM slots are faulty. I reset the CMOS and BIOS (to optimized defaults). Now, this morning, when I was burning a DVD with Alcohol 120%, everything else ran very slowly.. not CPU-wise, but the hard drive was grinding like crazy (Seagate SATA150), which it normally never does. I decided to intentionally load up Photoshop while burning, to see what would happen.. it locked the machine up. Not a hard lockup though, because the mouse could still move, etc., but nothing was clickable.

Is there some BIOS setting that was lost when I did the CMOS reset? Something about SATA, maybe? Running multiple apps works just fine, everything loads up pretty quickly.. but when that DVD is burning, the SATA drive gets slowed down quite a bit. Any ideas??
 
But why would it do that? I had two sticks of RAM, each one is 1GB. Since 3 out of the 4 DIMM slots are bad, I am reduced to 1GB instead of 2GB. If I check the task mgr performance, I'm using about 500MB or so of RAM total. It shouldn't be swapping, should it? And why only when Alcohol is burning a DVD?
 
maybe the last slot went bad and nothing is writing to the ram forcing you to run from 100% swapfile.
 
Here's something interesting. When I'm burning using Alcohol 120%, the "Memory Buffer Usage" is at 100% which is normal. When I close down Outlook or start an app though, the Memory Buffer Usage drops to 0%... the hard drive grinds like crazy... and once the app is donw loading, the buffer usages goes back up to 100%. But I have a whole 1GB of RAM, and only 508MB is in use. What the hell is going on?
 
Is there an option in your bios to enable or disable NCQ? Possibly it got turned off and now when you hit the drive with more than one thing at a time it is much slower.
 
Check in the Device Manager if your hard drive has been reduced to PIO mode. This normally happens when Windows detects a bunch of errors when reading or writing to the drive (could possibly be caused by bad RAM).
 
The RAM is fine, I already ran memtest86. As far as NCQ... I don't see an option for that, but i'll double check. And as far as PIO mode.. no such thing for SATA devices. And the DVD burner is in UDMA2 mode which is correct.

I'm RMA'ing this motherboard next week anyway, so maybe that will fix it. Issues are all over the place with this thing..
 
Amazing what bad DIMM slots will do. Even connecting to certain servers is slow.. if I telnet to my POP3 mail server, it just sits there for about 5-8 seconds, then connects..but other computers on the same network connect instantly.

Thankfully my Abit motherboard replacement is in the mail...
 
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