XP s.l.o.w

[Odoacer]

To make a long story short, after repeated, random(?) BSODs (DRIVER_IRQL was the message, or something along those lines) I can't really boot into Windows because of a bad video driver install (I think, because it BSOD'd on me a few times in the middle of the install process).

It has been _very_ sluggish - even at the safe mode selection screen (where you have 30 seconds to make your selection), it takes about 5 minutes to count down 30 seconds. The keyboard is mostly unresponsive - if I pound the 'up' arrow enough times, I'll eventually get lucky and the cursor will move to highlight the previous option.

If I let the countdown run, I see the Windows screen load up, ever so slowly too (I can actually see the XP logo fade in). After that, it's just black - I don't know if the computer is just trying to finish loading Windows, or if it's dead in the water.

I've tried to reinstall/repair too, but I/O also seems very sluggish in the setup interface. I have to pound away to get it to respond to any commands.

Not sure exactly what the issue is here. Any thoughts?

Here are my specs:

AMD64 3000+
MSI Neo K8T FSR
74GB WD Raptor II (SATA)
Geforce 6800 GT
1GB Ram

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Do you have dma enabled on your hard drive? You can find it somewhere in device manager.

 

[Odoacer]

I would check, if I could boot into Windows. Unfortunately, I can't.

 

[thebigdude]

If a clean reinstall of windows won't work then it should something with the hardware or a bios setting that is off. Are you overclocking at all?

 

[Odoacer]

No OCing or anything funny before all this started happening. I went ahead and reset the BIOS to default... was able to get into safe mode. Funny thing is, I tried this before and it didn't work... ah well, live and learn.

I went in and uninstalled my video driver, then reinstalled it. Same problems - I get a black screen after rebooting, so I have to go back into safe mode and reinstall it. Any ideas? (and thanks for all the help, guys!)

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

AGP bridge is shot or the CPU is bad. I've seen system run dog slow when the cache is bad on a processor.

 

[Odoacer]

I wised up and installed the previous-newest version of the Nvidia driver. Things seem to work OK now, but I don't think I ever fixed my original problem (the BSODing). If that ever happens again (and I wouldn't be surprised if it did), I'll get back to you guys in a different thread. Thanks for all the help!