Fixing a PC for someone, seriously slow! possible HDD issue?

DJMK4

DJMK4

DJMK4

Soldato
Joined
1 Dec 2004
Posts
23,118
Location
S.Wales
Im fixing a crappy Packard Bell PC for someone.

Spec is

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (1.91Ghz)
60GB Maxtor HDD
256MB Ram

Even after a wipe the pc is drastically slow, now i know its only got 256mb ram, and i have suggested to them a memory upgrade but even still it should be a lot quicker than this.

The thing i have noticed is the maxtor drive that they have is quite noisey and seems to make the "usual" hdd clicking when trying to seek data, but it drags on and on and on, stuff takes ages to load.

Obviously this pc could benifit from a RAM upgrade but is that maxtor on its way out?
 
Could possibly be the HDD. Also, the small amount of RAM won't help, try upgrading that and see if it makes much of a difference.
 
I will suggest it to them, I did warn them that even after a wipe it will still probably be slow because of the lack of RAM. Ill try that first, if that doesnt sort it then it must be the maxtor.
 
Try running HD Tune on the HDD to see what the speed of it is like, chances are its going to be slow compared to todays standards but you should be able to see by the graph if it looks ok etc.
 
Still having probles with this, it is stupidly slow, iv done xp installs on 256mb ram and its not way as bad as this. Is there any other tools out there to pinpoint the problem as being the HDD? I havnt got a spare one to test but maybe able to find an old 40gb tomorrow
 
Surely if you look at the windows task manager and look at the total commit charge this will tell you whether the problem is the disk or memory. If total commit charge is more than physical memory, then his PC is using the hdd as extra memory and that's why it's slow. My guess it is going over the physical memory, and even though it won't be the fastest hdd, upgrading the memory is the fast and cheap win here.
 
Definately try upgrading the RAM to 512MB at the bare minimum, but also try using the program nlite (http://www.nliteos.com/) to remove parts of xp that you don't need. I have a 700Mhz laptop with 256mb memory and although it doesn't "fly" it's now much quicker with an nlited install than it was with a standard install.
 
if your running XP id say 512mb is minimun for a smooth running box aswell.
Definetly have a play around with HDTune and run the error scanning and benchmarking stu.
good luck.
 
Here is the results from HD Tune,

hdd.JPG


I thought it might be just a RAM issue, its been so long iv seen 256mb ram running on XP I must have forgot how slow it really is, although the extensive clicking of the HDD made me worry abit.

Do those results look ok?

Please bear in mind that the HDD is currently not in the customers PC, its been removed and placed in my works PC.
 
What transfer mode is the hard disk running on, flat transfer rate @ 30MB/s for the vast majority of the disk just looks wrong, as does the 10% cpu load.

I suppose it could be the motherboard not supporting UltraDMA mode 5, but that mode has been around for quite some time now, I think the last time I had a board that didnt support it was in a Pentium 3 system!

Even UDMA Mode 4 supports 66MB/second. (Although its possible that if the hard disk is connected using a 40wire ribbon cable instead of 80wire cable is used, then the motherboard could revert back to UDMA Mode 2, which is limited to 33MB/s

Since around Service Pack 2, 256meg has pretty much become below minimum requirements for Windows XP, even before you start loading applications / AV scanners / AntiSpyware etc. 512 - 1024 gives a much smoother experience these days. Sure when XP was first released even 128Mb ram was "almost" tolerable for a web browsing system, but XP's been patched so far, it needs a lot more memory than it used to. IE6(7/8) use a lot more memory than IE3 used to, and Firefox while being a perfectly good alternative still uses a fair chunk of ram.

More ram, and see if you can resolve that 30MB/s bottleneck on the hard disk, and it should be a lot smoother. I would expect a Maxtor drive from that era to be between 40-50MB/s in the first 1/3'rd of the disk, and falling off to 25MB/second by the end of the disk (in a curve, not the flat line you got)

EDIT:
I didnt notice you moved the disk into your own PC, Did you hook it up using the customers ribbon cable, or in parallel with an EIDE CD Rom drive.. The 40/80 wire cable issue seems likely to me. If the customers cable is 40 wire, then you need to find an 80wire UDMA Mode 4(5,6) compatible cable.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom