Why does my computer seem so slow?

[Mallow]

formating is my answer to everything 😛

 

[Yzzim]

Sounds to me like some setting for your HD is wrong:

1. Defragment!
2. Check if DMA is on!

1. Just checked and my primary drive is hardly fragmented. It said that I didn't even need to defrag the drive.

2. DMA is on.

Edit - also 5 sec for IDE to USB tranzfr is about right. remember USB 1.0 is but slow compaired to your IDE channel.

Ok, for the second time ( 😉 ) this is USB 2.0, not just regular USB. I should be getting a lot higher transfer rates then regular USB.

I first tried installing XP-> SP1-> MB drivers-> all other drivers.

I had the EXACT same problem as you are describing.

Finally it was recommended to me to do the following->

XP-> MB drivers-> all other drivers-> SP1.

Now it works great.

I'm using Windows XP Pro w/SP1 built in. I've got all the updates for XP.

formating is my answer to everything

This is a fresh format tho 😱

 

[Chad]

Check for IRQ conflicts.

Also, right click on System and select "Manage" and look in the event viewer and see if XP is reporting any errors.

 

[Yzzim]

Ok, I just took out all of my pci cards (sound, nic, promise ide card, usb 2.0) and the boot time was actually longer this time. I didn't time it the first time it started so I restarted AGAIN with all the cards out and the time from startup to all programs loaded in Windows was 9 MINUTES. Gosh, felt like forever.

Once I put all the cards back in my boot time "decreased" from 9 minutes to about 7 minutes. Still way too long I think. What takes the longest is the time from the WinXP load screen (with the little blue bar going around) to the "welcome" screen.

I'm so sick of this I think I'm just going to ghost my current install and then do a fresh install of XP or 2000. Not sure which one I want yet. XP is almost too bloated for me. We'll see....

Originally posted by: Chad
Check for IRQ conflicts.

Also, right click on System and select "Manage" and look in the event viewer and see if XP is reporting any errors.

Thanks for the tip, never knew about that. Don't see anything ab-normal recently except for some Application errors that happened last night.

 

[Dug]

After your fresh install of XP did you notice how fast the very first reboot was?

If that was slow then I would think that there is a hardware problem.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: Dug
After your fresh install of XP did you notice how fast the very first reboot was?

If that was slow then I would think that there is a hardware problem.

I can't remember exactly but I highly doubt it was this slow or I would have been complaining about this sooner 😉

 

[Willoughbyva]

Maybe try loading bios defaults or bios optimized? If you know a little about your bios then you may want to go in a double check the settings. If you don't know anything about the bios then you may wish to leave it alone. When your comp. POSTs what does it show the cpu as? If you have taken all of the cards out and it still takes 9 minutes then it seems like there is something in the bios that isn't set right.

Hope you get it going faster.

EDIT spelling

 

[Dug]

I can't remember exactly but I highly doubt it was this slow or I would have been complaining about this sooner

Then do a fresh install and keep adding drivers until you do notice it.

 

[Yzzim]

A little update here. I was going to do a fresh install but I've got 11gigs worth of mp3s on my primary drive. I want to wipe it clean but need to transfer these files over to my storage drive. I've tried to transfer them and the transfer rate is TERRIBLE.

It took 5.5 minutes to transfer 89mb of mp3s. That's .27MB per second!! :frown:

DMA is enabled, I just checked it twice. Both hard drives are on seperate IDE channels on the motherboard.

Any idea what could be causing this? Is it really the BIOS?

I'm gonna flash the BIOS now to see if this helps.

 

[Yzzim]

Ok, I just flashed the BIOS and that went well. Updated it to CX or something like that. I cleared the CMOS and got everything up and running just fine and the Windows startup took FOREVER!!!!! Gosh it was like 12 minutes for Windows to startup.

So, I checked my hard drives to see if they were still on DMA. They went from Multi-word DMA 2 or something like that with the old BIOS to Ultra DMA 5 now. Is that a good thing? Is that normal?

I ran some "benchmarks" on the hard drives. I transfered some mp3s from the primary hard drive to my storage drive. Here's what I got:

50 secs for 61.2mb = 1.224mb/sec


75 secs for 69.4mb = .93mb/sec


238 secs for 84.8mb = .35mb/sec

Why the huge difference in speed? They were just mp3 files so it was like the 84.8mb was thousands of different files.

Windows does not seem any faster after the BIOS upgrade. If anything it seems a bit slower.

BAH, this sucks 🙁

 

[bsr]

that is some very very low benchmarks, 1MB/s = 8mbps . That is terrible, mine benchmarks around 80Mb/s buffered read , 22mb/s sequential read, 80mb/s buffered write, 21Mb/s sequential write...

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: bsr
that is some very very low benchmarks, 1MB/s = 8mbps . That is terrible, mine benchmarks around 80Mb/s buffered read , 22mb/s sequential read, 80mb/s buffered write, 21Mb/s sequential write...

Ok, so we know it's slow....now WHY is it slow?

 

[bsr]

is it a 7200rpm drive ? ata100/133 (dma mode 5) ?? Did you improperly format it ?

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: bsr
is it a 7200rpm drive ? ata100/133 (dma mode 5) ?? Did you improperly format it ?

as stated in original post, the 20gig is 7200 and the 40gig is 5400. Though I don't think that would make much of a difference

I believe it's ATA-133, though I could be wrong. Again, I don't believe ata100 or 133 would make much of a difference.

Improperly format it? I let Windows do the work. Let windows format the drive in NTFS.

 

[bsr]

did you make sure you clicked ntfs and not the ntfs quick format ? I dont really see were it would make a differents, but its possibly the prob.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: bsr
did you make sure you clicked ntfs and not the ntfs quick format ? I dont really see were it would make a differents, but its possibly the prob.

on the 20gig drive I did an NTFS "regular" format and it took FOREVER. So on the 40gig drive I just did the ntfs "quick" format.

Don't really see how that would make much of a difference in tranfer speeds though.

Right now I'm transfering about 1.5gigs worth of music from primary to storage. The computer is normal at times and VERY slow at others. The time remaining on the file transfer also jumps around a lot. Goes from 13 minutes all the way up to 100+ minutes at times.

 

[CaptnKirk]

You don't see this senario happen much any more, but the possibility still exists:

If you have the drives paired on the same IDE header, the speed of BOTH reduces to the speed of the SLOWER component,
that would make the 7200 RPM transfer to match the rate of the 5400 RPM unit, even though the disc speed stays up.
Also the burst rate of 133 drops to meet the ATA100 burst rate. Could you actually have an ATA66 as the slower drive ?
That would be 1/2 the speed of the fastest component on the chanel.
Same thing could be happening if you have the hard drives paired with an optical drive, I do not see where you mentioned what you have.

Next test: Move the 7200 RPM harddrive which you said is the PRIMARY to a MASTER - by itself on IDE 0/1.
Pair the 5400 RPM as a SLAVE, with your Optical drive as the MASTER on IDE 2/3.
This way the faster drive as a single slave will not be restricted by any potentially slower drive mechanism.
While you're doing that check to verify jumper configuration as MASTER or SLAVE, NOT CABLE SELECT.

Run your start-up & time it from Button push to your Icon display. Mine takes 110 Seconds.
Select your Icon & click - time your settings load. Mine takes 45 seconds.
Total time is 155 seconds - thats 2 minutes, 35 seconds, about normal to launch the 20 associated XP programs.

Have you downloaded and tried to run the Maxtor Disc Utilities ?
You'll have to dig for this, as only you know the exact models involved - they can run a Harddrive Diagnostics and analyze for problems.

My suspicion is you have a Drive going South, or an old drive bottlenecking the performance.

P.S. - Maxtor ATA133's don't run as efficiently as the WD ATA100's do.
You may want to consider a change in the future.

 

[Dug]

Reformat the hard drive.

If it is still slow then either your hd is bad or the motherboard.

 

[nealh]

Here is a suggestion not given....I have an AMD system with SB Live as well try George Breese's pci latency patch..as the VIA chipset and SB live do not live well together..I noted much improved unrar of files
Here is a link...George Breese's website site

BTW..I am using a P4 2.4@3.0 also and I have noted my programs are opening slower than on my AthlonXP system and .nfo and .txt files open very slowing...the only difference beside the obvious is I used WinXP Pro with slipstreamed SP1 on the the P4 and performace was better initially but after installing some programs it has gotten much worse...my point is it maybe the winxp install and a I pretty sure one of my programs has added more bloat....for me I know DVDcopy is an issue if I unistall it I can not click on a link in IE6 and have it open a new window, my PM AT no longer will work...

I need to reinstall winxp now but am too lazy

 

[Dug]

Forgot to add that you should try booting up in safe mode.

If you boot up in safe mode faster than you have been then its definately a driver/xp problem.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: CaptnKirk
You don't see this senario happen much any more, but the possibility still exists:

If you have the drives paired on the same IDE header, the speed of BOTH reduces to the speed of the SLOWER component,
that would make the 7200 RPM transfer to match the rate of the 5400 RPM unit, even though the disc speed stays up.
Also the burst rate of 133 drops to meet the ATA100 burst rate. Could you actually have an ATA66 as the slower drive ?
That would be 1/2 the speed of the fastest component on the chanel.
Same thing could be happening if you have the hard drives paired with an optical drive, I do not see where you mentioned what you have.

Next test: Move the 7200 RPM harddrive which you said is the PRIMARY to a MASTER - by itself on IDE 0/1.
Pair the 5400 RPM as a SLAVE, with your Optical drive as the MASTER on IDE 2/3.
This way the faster drive as a single slave will not be restricted by any potentially slower drive mechanism.
While you're doing that check to verify jumper configuration as MASTER or SLAVE, NOT CABLE SELECT.

Run your start-up & time it from Button push to your Icon display. Mine takes 110 Seconds.
Select your Icon & click - time your settings load. Mine takes 45 seconds.
Total time is 155 seconds - thats 2 minutes, 35 seconds, about normal to launch the 20 associated XP programs.

Have you downloaded and tried to run the Maxtor Disc Utilities ?
You'll have to dig for this, as only you know the exact models involved - they can run a Harddrive Diagnostics and analyze for problems.

My suspicion is you have a Drive going South, or an old drive bottlenecking the performance.

P.S. - Maxtor ATA133's don't run as efficiently as the WD ATA100's do.
You may want to consider a change in the future.

My drives are setup like that.

Also, the difference between ATA66 and ATA133 isn't going to be ~1MB/sec and 80MB/sec.

 

[Yzzim]

Originally posted by: nealh
Here is a suggestion not given....I have an AMD system with SB Live as well try George Breese's pci latency patch..as the VIA chipset and SB live do not live well together..I noted much improved unrar of files
Here is a link...George Breese's website site

BTW..I am using a P4 2.4@3.0 also and I have noted my programs are opening slower than on my AthlonXP system and .nfo and .txt files open very slowing...the only difference beside the obvious is I used WinXP Pro with slipstreamed SP1 on the the P4 and performace was better initially but after installing some programs it has gotten much worse...my point is it maybe the winxp install and a I pretty sure one of my programs has added more bloat....for me I know DVDcopy is an issue if I unistall it I can not click on a link in IE6 and have it open a new window, my PM AT no longer will work...

I need to reinstall winxp now but am too lazy

I found the pci latency patch last night and tried it. Windows still took forever to boot (even longer after the patch it seemed) and I haven't seen any improvement.

I'll most likely reformat tonight after work.

 

[JuicyFruit]

On my Asus P4B533-E, the "Lite" bios for the raid takes about 20 seconds.

 

[Chad]

Could this be DHCP related? I remember hearing of a problem sounding like this that had to do with a nic looking for and not getting a response from DHCP and therefore taking a really long time to boot up.

Perhaps someone else can expand on this (?).

 

[Dug]

Have you tried booting into safe mode.

When was the last time the system worked correctly and what were you doing right before this happened?