HDD Access very slow

core2kid

Senior member
Oct 21, 2006
285
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71
Recently my comptuer randomly started to show sluggish performance. I thought it was due to me holding backups of my other computer (70GB) on my primary C drive making the free space down to 2GB. I moved it over to my secondary D drive making that have 2GB free space but the C drive having over 60GB. The performance is still slow. The XP loading bar goes across the screen for about a minute before it loads. I am copying 2 files equaling 9.56GB from my D to C drive with TeraCopy and it's copying at 3.8MB/s.
What could be the problem?

Now copying files within Vista (D drive partitioned to run Vista), they copy at around 30MB/s.
 

mike pyne

Junior Member
Jul 15, 2009
8
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0
Hi Nmascarenhas,
I think 60 GB on C drive where system file are stored and processes the OS is too heavy. You should leave your C drive as light as possible. Removing 2GB doesn't make any difference. lesser the load on C drive better the performance of PC. Try to manually increase your ram space.

Regards,
Mike
rentfusion.com
 

core2kid

Senior member
Oct 21, 2006
285
0
71
When you say manually increase your RAM space, do you mean increase the physical RAM in the computer? I have 2GB inside and I have 2GB more but I haven't put it in yet.
Do you think Diskeeper is doing this to my computer?
 

jkresh

Platinum Member
Jun 18, 2001
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71
having almost no free space on a drive will lower performance (moving that should have helped), when was the last time you defragmented the C drive? What speed do you get moving from D to C in xp without teracopy, and have you run task manager to check if anything else is using the drive when you try to copy (or just listen to the drive when you are not doing anything if its constantly spinning when nothing should be running then you might have something running in the background which is slowing you down.
 

core2kid

Senior member
Oct 21, 2006
285
0
71
I actually figured out what the problem was. XP had kicked my SATA drive into PIO Mode. I have no idea why, probably from the frequent restarts with the button I did when I plugged in a new drive. I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled them with task manager and the computer's fine now.
 

mike pyne

Junior Member
Jul 15, 2009
8
0
0
To manually increase the RAM , please follow the below steps.

Right clich on mycomputer icon,
you will find system properties window,
Click on the Advanced tab,
Click on performance settings,
Performance option window will open,
Then click on the Advance tab of it,
At the bottom you will find Virtual memory.
So modify it with change button.

So your Ram size is been modified manually.

Regards,
Mike
Dell Laptop Rentals