Harddrive causing lag?

[fourty03]

Hey guys....

The problem I am having is that after Win 7 boots (about 3 minutes after sitting idle)
I get severe lag. The computer responds to my input (clicking start menu... launching an app...).. it can take up to 15 - 20 seconds to respond.

My system is as follows:

BIOSTAR 785G motherboard
AMD x2 250
Ocz 2gb ram
Ari 4650 512mb videocard
80gb maxtor hd
80gb seagate hd

The maxtor is the master.... and its the one that I can hear it seeking during the "lag"....

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[corkyg]

A likely cause of the lag is because your system is busy doing something like indexing or system restore shadow copies. Also, those are very small HDDs - how full are they in general percentage terms?

 

[fourty03]

Thanks for the reply....

I've turned off the indexing and disabled sys restore.... these hds came from my previous system. They are both about 80 % full or so...

Whem I boot into safemode the system hangs when it loads atipcie .... which I think that is my pciexpress card.

I removed it and that didn't help.

 

[RaiderJ]

Is it that laggy from a fresh install of Win7? If so, then I'd lean towards a hardware problem. Otherwise, does Win7 show a bunch of disk writes or heavy RAM usage in the task monitor?

 

[RebateMonger]

Check the Windows System Event Log for Disk-related errors. Older Maxtor disks, in particular, are likely to fail earlier than expected.

Also, if you are using SATA disks:
I had symptoms identical to yours when I installed Windows 7 with the Intel ICH 10R disk controller in AHCI mode. I'd click and nothing would happen for twenty seconds.

"Updating" the disk controller from the built-in MS AHCI driver to the Intel AHCI driver fixed my problem immediately.

Edit:
I guess you likely aren't going to be using Intel AHCI drivers, since you have an AMD motherboard.