Major Slowdown When Accessing Hard Drive

[Moggraider]

I'm having some major problems with my computer. Often when I open a program or whenever I install something, if it requires hard drive access, Windows starts acting like it was drowned in molasses. Something as simple as opening Adobe Acrobat causes mp3s to halt temporarily, screech, or loop a half-second back and forth until the program is finished opening. Installing and patching Knights of the Old Republic II took 40 minutes, and the patching was causing hangs for about a minute at a time. Installing Dark Age of Camelot's 14-day free trial caused huge slowdown too, so I know it isn't my disc drives.

I figure it's probably my hard drive, because games are fine for the most part. Does anyone know what I can do about this or if it might be something else? A defrag didn't help. CHKDISK for some reason took all night. Also I checked the IDE controller and the HDD is in PIO mode, even though "DMA if available" was selected. I don't know how to switch it.

My specs are:

Soltek K8T-Pro 939
Athlon 64 3500+
2 gigs of RAM
Radeon 9800
Samsung Spinpoint P SP0802N (80 gig HD, 15 gigs free).

Everything is no more than a few months old except the Radeon.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Blitz KriegeR]

Well, honestly there could be a number of things wrong. First and foremost, you said "no more than a few months old" ... does that include the OS install on your HD? Well, what I?m asking is did this just start to happen or has this been so since u got the PC running? If this just started it is most likely the result of spyware or such other malicious software causing the issue. If this has been an ongoing problem there is probably a compatibility issue or a configuration issue somewhere that you would need to uncover. Sorry I can't be of more help right now, but I'll check back later when you mention when the issue began.


--> Another thing you might want to think about is if this happened after installing any major program or some other incident, they could be linked.

 

[Moggraider]

I just got the HD in May. I formatted and installed Windows in late June. Spybot and Ad-Aware report no spyware.

 

[LukeMan]

You're able to play games fine? It's just the write-access to the hdd that is slow? read-access is fine?

Is there only computer hangup when you are copying data to the hdd? if it happens at other times, check if any 1 program is using up your cpu, check task manager(ctrl+alt+del) for any programs using 100% cpu usage. If no programs are using this much spu power, than continue below.

You can download a hard drive testing utility to check for any problems with it.

Samsung Hard Drive Testing Utility

if that shows no problems, then backup any data you want to keep and do a clean install of Windows.

 

[Blitz KriegeR]

Yes, I was gona say, spybot and adaware don?t really check to well in the registry and system files, the best thing you can do it back up your data and get a clean windows on there. Just take care and watch what you install, if u suddenly see the problem again you may be able to find what caused it.

good luck!

 

[Moggraider]

Actually what happened was Windows had switched the HDD to PIO on its own because it had detected errors. The hard drive was dying. It just died on me this morning; I replaced it. Thanks for the help.

 

[Moggraider]

You guys gotta lay off the spyware bit though .