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slow drive access

S

slater

Junior Member
Recently (past three days) my computer has been VERY slow loading programs (including windows). it has gotten to the point that opening the control pannel causes the little flashlight to scan for about 5 seconds until the icons show up. When started in Safe Mode, the computer behaves normally and programs load quickly.
Recent activity on the computer: a hard drive defrag, zipdrive parallel port accelerator run, zip drive reading problems (zip drives suck). Windows seems to start quickly, then bog down mid way in. Once loaded, programs run just fine. Maxtor diagnostic programs say the drive is just fine.
My system is:

Asus P5A
K6III-400
128mb of pc100
Stealth S540
Maxtor Diamondmax plus 13.6, 7200rpm
windows 98se

Any help would be much appreciated. Reinstall windows? Registry problem??
 
Check your drive properties in Device Options and make sure DMA is enabled. I've also heard that you will get better drive efficiency setting the disk cache settings in Windows to Network Server. Or better yet just get Cacheman and let it handle the drive cache. Works great for me, but it still doesn't solve the problem of that, in general, Maxtor drives suck.

MR2DI4
 
If it runs okay in Safe Mode then it sounds like you have a software problem.

Check system information > system configuration > startup and get rid of any programs starting up there that you don't need (only uncheck ones that you know what they do).

Definately enable DMA on the hard drive (be warned though, some higher level soundblaster cards can have sound distortion when combined with VIA chipsets and DMA on hard drive/cd roms.

Try using a system utility program to generally optimise your system (check it/mcafee first aid/norton systemworks), you can probably pick up one of these free or as a demo.

Update graphics drivers too.
 
Update,
I downloaded Norton Utilities Demo and installed it. Just the installation, without making any system changes yet, fixed the problem. Programs open quickly again. All I can figure, is that the installation changed a startup routine or separated some startup commands that interfere with each other (I had that problem too recently with NAV and Aureal drivers). Unfortunately, the demo runs out in 30 days and I hear that it is a bitch to get completely off the system.
 
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