Hard Drive Problem, what to do

[Wynner3]

Lately I have been playing Age of Mythology and having fun. I have been playing with a friend on my home lan with about 3 enemies and a few allies on hard level. Anyway, the computer I use has and AthlonXP 2100+, 512mb 266DDR Ram memory, Asus A7V266-C mobo, GeForce 4 Ti4400, 20Gb Seagate Hard drive (ata66), Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card, and WindowsXP Home. It kept having problems when we would be in big battles with our populations maxed out at 200, it would slow down a lot. I downloaded the latest patch for my videocard and that helped a lot.

But, my hard drive in the middle of games starts to work overtime or something. It makes a lot of noise for what reason I don't know. Also Zonealarm doesn't start as soon as it used to. Today I was going to defrag my drive but I clciked on a button that said analyze and it came up that my hard drive didn't need to be defragged. My hard drive is making noises and might be the problem to some slowdown I keep experiencing on normal and simple tasks.

Should I defrag my hard drive even though WinXP Home says it doesn't need to be yet or think about getting another drive or what?? The hard drive is a few years old and I haven't had any problems with it till now. Oh and at the times I play the games, I don't have anything runnning in the background. It doesn't happen to my friends computer.

What should I do?

 

[Markfw]

Well, for one, your hard driver is definitely the slowest thing in your PC, and is dragging down your performance. I would go with a Maxtor ata133 drive. Does your mb support 133?? If not, I would get a PCI controller for 133. I think the new Maxtors have fluid bearings, and an 8 meg cache. One of those would do wonders for your performance. One more idea; what virus software do you have installed ? Sometimes Mcaffe runs at all sorts of strange times, and when I am playing a game (and behind a hardware firewall, a router) I disable Mcaffe (shut it down)

 

[Wynner3]

I don't have a virus scanner and I shut zonealarm off because other computers can't see my computer on the network no matter what setting it is at.