Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

With my recent Broadband problems, I want to eliminate a PC problem whilst we are shouting at BT and not really getting anywhere fast.

Our PC is quite a good spec (3.0Ghz, 1GB RAM etc), recently we bought a 500GB 16mb HD and I have moved everything from the 200GB original HD onto this new one and are using the 200GB one just to run the OS and programs. However, the PC often sounds as though it is struggling. You can hear something inside the tower, probably the Hard Drive, but not sure if its the HD making the noise or a problem with the RAM causing the HD to work too hard? Whats most likely here? Does RAM go faulty? Is there a way to diagnose this problem?

Anyway, I have considered now buying an External Hard Drive, transferring all my data onto that and using the new'ish 500GB Internal Drive to run the OS and programs and throwing the original 200GB drive in the bin.

If so, is this a good External Drive?? Seems to be a good spec for a really good price to me.

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx...11157,47610000

BM08

Hard drive space and how the pc runs will only be a factor when you have like 100MBs left, im pretty sure you have more to spare than that?

Is windows indexing service turned off? that normally keeps the HDD busy all the time

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

I have been to the point where the main 200GB HD is almost totally full, now practically everything is off it, and it has 160GB free. I am more wondering if it is faulty, or the memory is faulty, which is over-working the HD. I guess I must be able to monitor the performance somehow to see if at the times the Broadband is slow that the Hard-drive is on its knee's too?

I guess I ought to try and hard-wire another device such as a Laptop into the Router to see if that struggles too at the same time. That should prove or disprove the BT side of things.

BM08

If things are noisy and slow to load then your HDD is on its way out, i dout it would be ram, you'd be getting blue screens and crashing all the time if the ram was giving up the ghost.

Dont get western digital get a Seagate Barracuda

L33 BYT

CTRL ALT DELETE then task manager.
Whats using all your processor?

Thrush

iTrader: (1)

A 500gb drive just to run the OS and a few programmes is incredbly overkill - I run a sole C: drive for the OS, programmes, and also have data on it (music, video etc that gets downloaded to the C Drive and then transferred to a network drive) and thats a 60gb drive with 25-30gb free space most of the time.

If you intend on having the internal C: drive to be a processes drive only, and want to keep all data on a seperate drive (which I think is a GOOD idea as you don't lose any important files should you have to reformat at any point, or the C: drive dies) then you should only need a 40gb or 60gb (max) drive for this.

As said, HDD's typically won't slow a PC's performance down unless a) there is NO space on it at all (like said, last couple hundred of MB) b) the drive is fucked (but typically you'd have booting probs with a fucked drive, not jsut slow performance) and/or c) it is an old spec drive with ridiculously slow seek times (typical IDE drives are 7,200rpm, but even 5,400 rpm disks won't slow a PC's performance down particulary noticeably...)

How are you hard drives currently configured? Both the 200gb C and the 500gb drives internal drives? If so, C would be master with the 500gb being the slave... How are they connected? IDE or SATA? If IDE, have you connected both HDD's to the same IDE ribbon cable?

Cos if you have then yes, expect a speed slow down. the main problem with the IDE interface is it's inability to read and write to two devices on the same IDE channel at the same time. It reads from one, travels the cable to the mobo, reports the data/info, then travels the IDE ribbon again to write to the slave drive, and then cycles all over again...

For a more effective performance, you need to seperate the HDD's to the two different IDE Channels. C Drive needs to remain as MASTER on the IDE 1 channel, then have say, your CD-ROM as slave on the IDE1 channel. On IDE 2 you should put your CD/DVD writer as primary, with your slave HDD in the slave position on IDE 2. This means when accessing data on the slave 500gb drive, C can run at full potential, aswell as the slave as they are both on seperate IDE channels. Likewise when you write data to a CD/DVD C (which runs the burning app) is running 100% and the optical writer (which burns the data) also runs 100%....

If you have connected in a SATA config, ignore all the above

USB2 connected external drives will give a marked improvement in speed of data transmission, with USB2 offering a theoretic 480mbps of transmission. Firewire, although rated at 400mbps, is actually better - don't ask me, just read here -> CLICKY

Personally, I have my config like so;

C (60gb, OS and apps only) on primary IDE1. I have a 320gb slave on slave IDE1 (yes I know it's wrong place, but hey - I didn't know the above info at the time!) to which I write backup files of data I don't want to lose should anything go tits up. This is a dormant drive tho, and doesn't get accessed often, except to back up to and from...

But my main data storage is a NAS (Networked Attached Storage) 400gb drive, connected via 10/100 ethernet cable, to which both my main PC and my HTPC downstairs can access. Anything downloaded or ripped is "uploaded" to the NAS drive, then I can play all my media on any PC on my network (and via FTP on any terminal in the world, but thats another story). I have not yet found a file speed vs size limitation even tho cat5 cable only offers a theoretical 100mbps transmission - but even .h264 HD ecoded files, some of which are fucking MASSIVE, with insane bit rates, have played jerk and stutter free

Hope any or all of this is some help

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Thrush,

I bought the 500GB drive as an intended replacement for the 200GB drive as I have suspected it for a while now. Both the 200GB drive that the machine came with (3 years old) and the new one are Western Digital Caviar SE units, the 200GB one is 8mb, while the new one is 16mb.

I have actually partitioned the 500GB drive and it is used purely for storage at the moment, against my original plan of doing away with the suspect old drive.

I fancy the idea of an External drive, so I can move my data around, if required. Have I seen that it is possible to buy casings to allow the use of an Internal drive Externally via USB? If so, that would certainly be an option, then I could buy a new smaller drive for the OS (as I wouldn't need to buy the External drive that I have anticipated). I do know what you mean about the 500GB unit being overkill. I do need the storage space, but I really do want it to be external/separate.

DanRSturbo

Mr C, I had no idea you was in such turmoil, apolagies for the lack of absence.


Buy a realatively small hard drive just for windows. 80 odd gig and then do a fresh install, then install broadband and test. Download something from microsoft to get an accurate speed test. Granted speed of hard drive coupled with broadband speed will have some effect. To really poke it up BT's arse buy this http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114117

Then for a secondary drive get this http://www.ebuyer.com/product/106232

They will have no comeback on the hard drive speed

With referance to an external hard drive, I have this http://www.ebuyer.com/product/124035 which does the job perfectly, not big enough to backup everything I have, but partially sufficient.

2 of these would do the job fine, or get 2 smaller ones depending on budget.

DanRSturbo

Oh, memory / ram failure usually will give crashes / blue screens of death etc. A hard drive on it's way out will do "clicking" and loudish noises, will also be very slow accessing and transferring stuff off it could be a problem. In this instance, remove hard drive, place in a sealproff anti static bag like hard drives come in and place in freezer overnight. Put back into pc and get stuff off as fast as you can

EssexBoyRacer

How old is your pc?

Have you cleaned it out recently?

You'll be suprised at the amount of dust that collects inside a PC, this makes them run hotter and if you have fans that adjust in speed by temperature then they will end up running at full speed more often.

Remove your main CPU fan and give the heatsink a good hoover. You'll be suprised how quite your pc runs afterwards!

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Dan, thanks for your reply.

Just to clarify, it would seem ideal to replace my 200GB 3-year-old HD with that 10k RPM Raptor. I have no problem with that.

However, the 500GB unit I have is only months old and I don't want to make that redundant. So, I guess the question is partially answered, but now I need to know if it is possible to run the 500GB 'Internal' drive as an external unit?

EBR - Yes, I am aware of how filthy and dusty the machines get inside. I do clean mine periodically. Thanks all the same.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Would this help me, in terms of a way to use my 500GB drive as an external device?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=672065

BM08

WTF is all this, im a pc person but im totally lost with what your trying to achieve and what the actual issue is

Ill leave it to dan and essexboy i think

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

I can't see whats so confusing. In a nutshell.....

I have a slow BB connection and suspect that one of my HD's is faulty. So I am trying to juggle my equipment around to make the best and most economical use of it.

My old 200GB HD is iffy, so I want to replace it with the Raptor that Dan linked to. But I don't want to make my almost new 500GB HD redundant. Aside from the BB issue, I wanted an External HD, so am hoping I can convert my 500GB Internal HD to run Externally. Make sense?

BM08

yeah.

Download something from that MS site dan linked, you should get full speed from that.

Adrian

Icy Box should be fine as long as its a SATA drive you are putting in.

I got something similar from Anglian Internet for an old IDE drive.

Also run one with a 40gb 2.5" (laptop drive) in as its easier to carry around in my pocket.

tonyk

Most of what Thrush wrote is accurate so to save me typing all this again im just gonna edit his post a bit with my replies being in bold type.


I personally think the problem with your pc is the Amount of Ram you have and the C: drive may also need defragmented. When we first get a brand new computer and switch it on we may have 512mb of our 1GB ram free as only the operating system is running so the computer works pretty quick.

Though as time goes on and we add antivirus and firewall which are essential programs for most people this 1GB of Ram gets cut even further as these run alongside windows. If you have the like of itunes, quicktime, java etc installed these reduce the ram further and then when you load internet explorer and that takes more Ram, suddenly 1GB could be gone. Once your computer runs out of ram it uses your HD (virtual memory) and this causes your computer to run slower.

I would hold ctrl, alt and delete and bring up the system dialog box and click the performance tab this will tell you how much ram you have free. I would then download and run a program called adaware, defrag my hard drive and add an extra 1GB of Ram(Ł30). [/b]

RANJ

defrag hard disk first point of call, then also make sure paging file is setup coorectly, if you have a slave drive stick the page file on this

thanks

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

I do regular maintenance. I run AdAware and AVG regularly, I also actively delete programs and shit I don't need and run regular defrags. The 200GB HD that runs the OS has about 160GB free on it.

The 500GB HD that I want to use externally is a SATA drive, so I think I will sort this all out by buying the Raptor drive to run the OS and use the 500GB drive as the external that I wanted anyway. Hopefully that'll get the PC running happily, then I can really chomp at BT if the Broadband is still slow.

tonyk

Trust me, you do not need a raptor drive and to get a serious improvement in performance you would need to buy two of them and run them in a raid array. A sata drive will offer a performance increase as it can transmit 150mbs compared to an ide drives 66, 100 or 133mbs. Sata II can offer speeds of 300mbs but it is unlikely that your board will support this. If it does then buy one of these.

Did you try Ctrl. Alt and Del and see what your free ram was? Also try a free online scan from Microsoft as AVG is pretty basic and does miss things. Make sure it is set to scan compressed files as well. It should take about 3 or 4 hours to run a full scan on approx 200GB or data.

As I said above I think your computer needs the Ram upgraded and this will provide you more of a system boost. I am running Vista Ultimate on a p4 2.8 with 1.5GB of Ram and with only the OS, Internet explorer, utorrent and avast antivirus running I am using 630MB of Ram and when I open Outlook 2007 the Ram usage goes up to 710MB.

Edited to add; How do you access your broadband? Is it through a wireless router or direct connection to the pc via USB or ethernet? If buy wireless router list the make and model of both the router and wireless network card.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

I thought 1GB of ram was good!!

Good news about the Raptor thing. Perhaps I will just buy a 70odd GB Primary then. Whatever happens that 200GB is dodgy and it'd be better out of the equation.

I will take another look at the Motherboard spec, I do have it somewhere. It's quite a good one from memory. When we got this machine, it was a proper entertainment system from Hewlett Packard.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Incidentally, here is some data from my Motherboard.....

ASUSTek Puffer
Chipset - Intel i915P/i915G Rev B1
Southbridge - 82801FB (ICH6)

Mean anything in terms of whether it supports SATA300? Also, what memory I should get?

tonyk

Intel 915 chicpsets usually use ddr 2 ram. There is many version of DDR 2 ram such as 533mhz, 667mhz etc... I would look at the model number of your HP PC (usually found by serial number) and then go to there website and match the speed up and get the spec of the board. It will also tell you how many slots the board has. If you run Windows XP then 3GB is the maximum amount of Ram it can allocate and anything above this is wasted. I would personally add at least another 1GB to what you have, Ł50 will get you another 2GB of ram (2 x 1GB)

Going for a small HD is false economy as programs get larger and larger. As an example Microsoft Office 2007 uses 3GB for a full install, nero 7 weighs in at almost 1GB and when you add this to the space the OS and system restore takes up.

If it turns out your board can take Sata II and you are on a small budget then I would go for the Hitatchi GST Deskstar T7K range as these give very good performance for the price.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Thanks for that. Will take a look at HP's website later on as I know it is very informative as to the exact spec.

Anymore for anymore?

rsnutters1

how can you tell this please probably right in front of me but i do not know were i'm looking!! thanks

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Here is my Task Manager window, I ran this while the Speedtest was running and only seeing 1/2 meg Broadband speed.



Any clues?

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Motherboard: ASUS PTGD1-LA

HP/Compaq name: Puffer-UL8E

---------------------------------------------------------

Two serial ATA (SATA) connectors, each supporting two ports

Hot swap function

----------------------------------------------------------

Four 184-pin DDR DIMM sockets

Supports PC3200 (400 MHz) /PC2700 (333 MHz) / PC2100 (266 MHz) DDR DIMM type

Maximum HP/Compaq approved memory module is 1 GB

Maximum HP/Compaq approved memory is 4 GB

S2martin

Christian go here and run the tool and it will give you all the memory info you need etc

http://www.crucial.com/uk/



Always bought memory from them and it overclocks etc very well.


Mart

DanRSturbo

The raptor suggestion was just merely for bt's benefit. A 7200rpm hard drive will be fine As for the ram, http://www.ebuyer.com/product/59346 should be fine

Chrisitan, what sort of line do you have ? Download this and see what sort of speed you get http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

tonyk

Christian, first off your board takes DDR 1 ram aka pc3200 and your board has 4 slots taking a maximum of 1 GB each. The amount of free ram you have left is 370MB and your CPU is running at 10%. Personally I would order the Ram first, add an extra 2GB making 3GB total. Leave the Hard Drive for now.

The average hard drive can read and write data at 44megabyte per second, Virgin is the fatest BB available at 20megabit per second and is way off the hard drives speed, meaning the hard drive wouldnt cause slow downloads. That file DanRsturbo provided (halo trial) took me 1m 2 seconds to download on Virign 20MB.

How is your Broadband connected to the PC? Do you run an extension lead from the phone socket to the modem? Also when you are downloading, take screenshots of the process and network tabs.

RSNutters, Your system has 512MB ram of which there is approx 128MB free. If your system is slow upgrade the ram. 1GB is really a minimum today.

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

tonyk - That file Dan linked to, I downloaded at around 60kb/sec. I got bored and aborted it.

I'm not worried about the spec of the 200GB drive, I'm sure that its a very good one, I'm more worried that it might be faulty.

I hear what you are saying about the RAM though. Any input, other than Dan's links, to good deals on suitable memory upgrades?

tonyk

Christian, memory is memory at the end of the day. Unless your going to overclock the computer there is not really any point in spending big money on it such as Corsair Pro at Ł70 for 1GB. The link Dan has posted is fine, Kingston is a reliable brand and it will do the job well.

www.scan.co.uk only sell branded decent components and I use them because they dont charge a Ł15 excess to post to Northern Ireland (Ł15 even on a stick of ram!) The corsair value Ram on scan is good, though its out of stock in 1GB sizes at the moment.

As for the HD, use this site and download the approapriate software to test your HD. http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

St3V3_C

How did you get on with this?

That's got to be an easy check you can make to work out where the problem is?

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

I am currently on a Laptop, wired directly into the Router via the Ethernet cable. This is what I get.....




Beccy has just come off the phone having spent a whole hour speaking to Sanjay Singh.

DanRSturbo

1.5 meg line I think that is

Spiky

iTrader: (1)

what have you got running that takes up 718mb of running???

Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

DanRSturbo

Move out of the sticks

DanRSturbo