Upgraded, but now system seems slower

[CPA]

Thanks to Hot Deals, I ended up picking up an AMD64 55fx and an EVGA 7900 GTO. Because of the new video card, I had to pick up a new motherboard with a PCI-Express slot. So I went with a Gigabyt K8N NForce4 SLI board.

This configuration replaced my old AMD 3300, ABIT board (non NForce) and an NVidia 6800 card.

No changes were made to RAM (Corsair 512 x 2)

So, after putting in everything last night, I had to reinstall windows (my guess is that my current windows config did not like the new motherboard). Well, this forced my to also have to reinstall all of the windows updates.

Everything back in order, and I notice that the harddrive is working a lot more in the new set up than the old one and additionally programs are taking more time to load up and minutes sometimes to close. When I have more than one program open, things can hang for minutes if I switch between programs and, again, the hard drive is working like crazy.

All diagnostic tests don't show anything wrong or missing and I installed all of the IDE and device drivers that came on the motherboard and video card disks.

What can a) be causing the harddrive to work a lot more and b) cause programs to hang and generally perform slowly?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[sisq0kidd]

Sounds to me like it could be a couple of problems.

If your hdd is being accessed a lot more than it used to, you can pretty much bet that some program (or windows itself) is allocating all the memory and therefore having to access your hdd for information.

I would make sure of the following:

1. All memory is seen by both the bios and Windows. 512 vs 1gb ram can make a difference in XP.

2. Check which program, if any, is sucking up your cpu cycles or memory and either end the process or troubleshoot from there.

Sorry, I can't give a definate answer, just pretty much reiterating what you may already know.

 

[BurnItDwn]

This is probably a longshot here but perhaps there are issues with DMA on the hard drive???
I'd recommend downloading the Nforce drivers again and installing them. Be sure to install the IDE and/or SATA drivers.

I've had issues in the past with Win2K where it wanted to run drives in PIO mode 4 even though they were UMDA 5 drives. I haven't personally run into this with XP, but I've only been running XP for about 1 year, and even then, only on one PC.

 

[sieistganzfett]

try the latest drivers for your video card and nforce4 platform from nvida's website, it could be something corrected in a driver newer than what you used from the cds. im a bit curious if you formatted the hd then reinstalled or "repair installed" your existing xp install.

 

[CPA]

Originally posted by: sieistganzfett
try the latest drivers for your video card and nforce4 platform from nvida's website, it could be something corrected in a driver newer than what you used from the cds. im a bit curious if you formatted the hd then reinstalled or "repair installed" your existing xp install.

I chose repair installed, but it did seem like it reinstalled.

 

[sieistganzfett]

you did the repair install, your programs and everything were still there, you just had to install some of the new drivers from the cd, its been running slower? so what kind of luck did you get from trying out the different suggestions we all gave?