Why is this machine so awfully slow?

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,202
Hi guys,

One of my machines is rather problematic. It's very, very slow. Every time you try and do anything it must first be proceeded by what seems like an age of noisy annoying hard drive clunking. Opening windows up means a slideshow as icons populate, etc etc.

I've done loads of tests - I've benchmarked every aspect of the machine and everything appears to be performing as it should be expected but the entire windows experience on this machine is like wading through treacle. Now I'm not expecting performance to rival my main machine but it should at least be speedy enough to handle general browsing? I can't think whats wrong and I'm getting tempted to throw the whole lot in the bin and buy a cheap C2Duo setup because I just cant think what else to do.

I've formatted many times, doesn't seem to make ANY difference.

Any suggestions before it all goes in a skip?

Spec is..

Athlon64 3200+
DFI Lanparty Ultra-D
8800GT 512Mb (Was an X850 XT, but swapped it out to test... no difference)
2Gb of Corsair XMS3200LL
160Gb Maxtor Diamondmax Plus9 HDD
Enermax Liberty 400W PSU

It's running XP Pro SP3.

I mean its not THAT bad a spec, is it?
 
Conflicting drivers maybe? Try installing Windows on a new or different HDD and see if the problem re-occurs. IMO its likely to be software related.

- Pea0n
 
must first be proceeded by what seems like an age of noisy annoying hard drive clunking.
Click to expand...

I have Four machines running XP SP3, one an AM2 X2 3800 and one a S939 3200+

Both of the above have 1GB and are fine. They really don't like 512MB or less with SP2 or SP3 so 2GB is plenty of ram

I'd say your hard drive is either sickly or badly defragmented. Diskeeper Lite 7.0 Build 418 (free - google) is what I use on the XP machines as windoze defrag is pants

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Yeah my first point of call would be to try a different HD.
Looking at my receipts, I bought my 160gig DM9 drives 4.5 years ago, so assuming yours are of a similar age it could be suffering.
 
Same mainboard I'm running at the moment. Have you got up to date drivers for it? Mine runs like pants until I install them.
 
That's still a good four years old. My Maxtor Diamondmaxes both failed on me within two months of each other, and they we're only two years old.

They aren't the best drives for reliability in all honesty. Try swapping it if you haven't already.
 
Pretty much everytime I've seen symptoms like that (drive clunking and icons being drawn incredibly slowly) has been down to I/O issues.

By far the most likely culprit will be the HD itself, although it (or another IDE device) running in PIO mode or similar could cause this (NB windows can sometimes automatically reduce the speed if it has detected errors). A dodgy IDE cable could be another reason.

My recommendation would be to just unplug the HD and install windows on a different one. Remember that not only are HDs one of the components most susceptible to mechanical failure, they are also the main bottleneck to system performance. There's no real reason I would expect a system of that specification to have any trouble running windows following a reformat unless it either had missing chipset drivers, drives running in PIO mode or a more serious problem with the HD/cabling.
 
I had similar problems with my old machine back in january, funnily enough that was also running on a diamond max plus 9 (80GB, 10thsept'04). After making sure the disk controller was set to DMA, then doing a full reinstall, I turned it on a few days later and was greeted by the smell of one of the chips on the back of the drive burning out!

I'd say you most likely need a new HDD (I ended up building a new system).
 
Another vote for it being the hard drive. I have a similar system as a backup (lanparty sli-dr fx-57 3gb ddr1 7800gtx etc ) and its nice and snappy in xp sp3... however i now have a sata seagate drive in it as the old maxtor was showing its age.

Get a newer hdd and i bet your system will respond nicely.
 
Yep probably just the age of the drive. Looking at some benchmarks on storagereview.com, 160GB drives that age are under half the speed of a modern 320-500GB or similar drive.
 
Had a couple of DiamondMax 9s do this to me when it runs out of sectors to re-allocate for bad ones. Try checking the disks SMART status using something like Everest or SpeedFan.
 
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