Problems with system lag and slow hard disk... *FIXED!*

[AtomicAlien]

Ok, first here is my system specs.

Athlon XP 1700+
512MB Kingston ValueRAM DDR333
MSI KT3 Ultra Motherboard
AMI BIOS 5.7
Maxtor 6E040L0 Liquid HDD
ATA133 IDE Cable, system at ATA133 speeds
Windows XP Professional w/ latest updates
VIA 4-in-1 4.46

My whole system will sometimes get a little laggy and sit for a while. It happens randomly, no real symptoms.
My hard drive only benchmarks 975 with PCMark2002, I thought these were supposed to get about 1200 or so?!

This all started after I reformatted my HDD because I was having system problems, and I flashed my BIOS to 5.7 while I was at it. Could this have screwed this up?

I reinstalled the VIA Drivers and made sure the BIOS was properly optimized but no go.

Nothing is OC'ed BTW.

Thanks!

I fixed it people! What I did is below...
1. Installed the VIA Miniport Drivers to force Windows XP to use ATA133, this driver also has some IDE performance enhancements.
2. Registry editing: I forced Windows to load it's kernel to memory instead of the much slower hard disk and enabled a large system cache (more geared for servers, but what the hey).
3. As Evermore suggested I uninstalled Service Pack #811493.
And now my hard drive is back up to 1287 in PCMark2002 and 30636 in SiSoftSandra 2003! Hows that for an "old" hard drive, eh?

Now I have to figure out why my system sits idle at post for about 10 seconds while apparently doing nothing before loading windows... It started happening after I installed the VIA Miniport Drivers, perhaps I should do a fresh run of BootVis.

Thanks for all your help!

 

[Lord Evermore]

Check other threads about WinXP being slow (in Operating Systems). One of the latest updates destroys performance.

 

[AtomicAlien]

Ok, I did what Evermore suggested and the system feels a little more responsive but the HDD still lags considerably. Any other suggestions?

 

[AtomicAlien]

^bump^

 

[AtomicAlien]

^more bump^

 

[dmurray14]

Probably a stupid suggestion, but it's happend to me: you do have antivirus running w/ updated definitions, right? I'm currently dealing with a few computers infected with viruses that exhibit the same symptoms you describe.

Heh, that sounded like i was a doctor!

Anyway, update your defs!

Dan

 

[Jeff7181]

I seriously doubt you'd get a HDD score of 1200 with that Maxtor 6E040L0. It's an outdated model with a 2 MB cache... I'm surprised it even scored as good as it did.

You might check the BIOS and whatnot to make sure Bus Mastering is turned on, and check in Windows to make sure DMA is on.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I seriously doubt you'd get a HDD score of 1200 with that Maxtor 6E040L0. It's an outdated model with a 2 MB cache... I'm surprised it even scored as good as it did.

You might check the BIOS and whatnot to make sure Bus Mastering is turned on, and check in Windows to make sure DMA is on.

Actually, even though the drive is slightly old, it performs like a charm and is the quietest thing ever. Even my brother's new 120GB 8mb Cache drive makes more noise. A Seagate 20GB 5400rpm drive we have makes more noise as well. I think that scores aren't everything because people have seemed to prefer (in my experience atleast) a computer that is decently fast and is quiet compared to a freaking fast computer but with like 5 fans on it.

 

[Jeff7181]

Well, I have 9 fans if you count all the fans in the PSU and on the video card and such...

And noise isn't a problem... maybe I'm just use to computer noise like I said in another thread... but it doesn't bother me, and it doesn't bother anyone else. I don't even notice it unless I listen for it. Hell, the heat and air-conditioning in this house makes more noise than the computer.

 

[AtomicAlien]

Jeff7181: DMA and BusMaster is enabled.

AgaBooga: I agree, I dont know how this can be old, it's only a DiamondMax8. Besides before I formatted my hard drive I consistantly had a score of 1125-1200.

DMurray14: I did a virus scan, to no avail.

Thank you for your responses, anyone else?

 

[AtomicAlien]

Bump for being fixed!