Programs slowing down, boot painfully slow

[sswingle]

I just redid my computer a week ago, so this is a brand new windows installation. Sometimes, programs will just freeze for a little bit. The entire system doesn't, just the individual program. Task manager will say the program is not responding. Sometimes I need to end the task, other times the program will eventually start working on its own just fine.

Also, bootup takes forever. I haven't timed it, but its really slow. It sits on the Windows XP screen for forever, the hard drive doing practically nothing. THen it goes to a black screen and sits there for a while.

It's not like my computer is working to death either. Whenver a program freezes, I can check task manager, and it reports something like 2% CPU usage. THe hard drive LED is barely blinking every few seconds.

I originally had a problem with my drives being in PIO. I installed the new VIA drivers for that thinking it would fix the slowness.

Also, games work great. Play max payne 2 with all the visual details on high and it works great. Half life also works fine.

Another thing I have noticed is videos will lag a little bit once every few minutes. Not a huge problem, but I'm sure its connected.

Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: Something else it does, in Sisoft Sandra when I try to benchmark the file system...it starts out like it is testing normally, the hard drive led is on solid, but after a minute or so the led goes off and does its kinda blink every so often thing. Sisoft never finishes, and I need to end task the program.

 

[sswingle]

Since no one has replied, I have some more information.

I ran Norton Speed disk on drive C last night, and again on drive D this morning. When I started drive c, it seemed to be rather slow. The hard drive activity led was lazily blinking. Total time for defrag about 4 hours for a 13 GB drive. Did drive D this morning. Hard drive led came on solid. Total time, about 2 hours. Drive D is 120 GB.

Drive C is a ATA 66 Western Digital
Drive D is a ATA 133 Maxtor

Is my hard drive going bad?

 

[ITJunkie]

I think your hard drive is good place to start. Based on what you have stated anyway.

 

[sswingle]

What I don't understand is why it would start right after replacing the motherboard.

 

[kursplat]

could be a bad ribbon , connectors not pluged ALL the way in , bent pin ....
also , just me i guess , but i would have put windows on the fastest drive.
good luck

 

[sao123]

1)You should redo windows again...this time make your C drive the ATA133, your swap file being on the ATA66 will painfully slow you down. You should also try to take advantage of the ata133, if you mobo only supports ata100, get a pci ide ata133 card.

2)turn off system restore and all those unecessary services and appz running in the background.
Make sure yuor drives are detected as udma in bios. pio is really slow. Then make sure they are detected as udma in windows. install the latest busmaster drivers from via.

3)press control -alt-delete and watch your performance tab of the task manager...
make sure the commit charge doesnt exceed your amount of ram, sometimes the system cache gets too large , then you need to run a program like ramfree or ramdefrag.

 

[imported_Phil]

1)You should redo windows again...this time make your C drive the ATA133, your swap file being on the ATA66 will painfully slow you down. You should also try to take advantage of the ata133, if you mobo only supports ata100, get a pci ide ata133 card.

Oh for goodness' sake. Do you really think his hard disk is going to break 100Mb/sec? And therefore, somehow, magically, he's absolutely going to need an extra 33Mb/sec of bandwith that his drive won't even use?

God, I get fed up with these kinda answers with hard disks. "Oh, it's got more bandwith, so logically, it must be faster! W000zt0r0r! I am uber-1337 because my drives' host interface can do 133Mb/sec!"

I had ATA/100 on an old board. I switched to a new board with the same HD, processor and RAM, and do you know what amazing difference I noticed? Fsck all. Now there's a revelation.

pwddesign: An ATA/133 card will do nothing for your problem. It's one of two things:

1. Bad hard disk. Run scandisk / chkdsk / fsck / whatever to see if it is.

2. You have Norton Antivirus. Uninstall it & reinstall it, Liveupdate the nasty piece of work and your problem should go away, the same thing happened to me once.

Hope this helps.

[Edit] Even with two hard disks it's never going to saturate the ATA bus. With three that can all break 45Mb/sec, it's possible, and that's if, and only if they're all transferring flat-out, constantly. Hmm, likely.