Some of you may know I'm having a few performance problems with the PC, well run a diagnostic and found out that my hard drive is only transfering at 3mb/s when it should be 10 times that amount.

I have used window wash (thanks smit) and cleared all the temp files and even deleted my whole video collection

Its better, but still really slow

Anything else I can try?

 

30mb/s? Are you sure matey? Which antivirus/security do you run cause Norton slows you PC down big time matey.

 

norton, but have been using norton since we got the pc and its not caused any problem.

I get the pc checked with house call regular too.

The damn thing is hacking me off.

 

Defrag the HDD.

 

Seriously, Norton slows down a PC like nobody's business. It's bad news mate.

 

Defraging the drive now, was 24% fragmented

Hopefully this should speed it up

But its gonna take a while

 

Defragging has the same effect on your HD as organising your DVD collection in alphabetical order. Basically your PC will find files faster, but if you are running Norton you are still running much much slower than you could be. Also, how much RAM are you running as I'm sure XP uses about 40% of what you have.

 

Just looking up the usage, used pcpitstop.com to run a diag and the only area it said there was a problem was with the HDD

Have 512meg and a 2gig processor.

 

Right done the defrage noe and.... still running slow!!1

 

Most likely it in pio transfer mode and not dma

Check properties of your ide controllers in device manager

 

New hard drive time I reckon, could always run a scandisk and attempt to repair any bad sectors / clustors on it.

 

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MadMac, a possibility........
You need to test the voltages going to the hardrive.

Two are used, 5 volts (red and black wires) used to power the electronics.
And 12 volts (yellow and black) used to power the drive motor.

If the 12 volts is low, the motor will spin slower reducing the data transfer rate
and reliablity of the read/write heads.

Data will still be read from the drive at lower speeds as the spin rate is irrelevant
and the data clock speed is determined from the reading data stream on the disk.

The 5 volts should be at least 4.92 volts DC
and the 12 volts should be at least 11.7 volts DC

The voltages need to be checked at the drive iteslf on the connector that
plugs into it whilst still powering the drive.

Take care if measuring yourself not to short anything out.

 

Right found that and it is set to "DMA mode if avilable" but is currently running pio mode....

Wont give me an option to change it permanatly to DMA mode either?

How can I get round this?

 

look inthe bios/cmos setup

there are a few types of IDE transfer mode:

PIO (fucking slow )
DMA 33 (33 mbit/sec = divide by 8 toget megabytes a sec)
UDAM66 (66)
ATA100 (100... lol)
ATA133 (guess! lol)

 

Remove any ide controller drivers, via 4in 1 etc and re-install the ms ide driver

 

ratty, its hittng PIO before it even boots into windows, despite the fact its set up CORRECTLY in the bios

im gonna have a butchers tomorrow

 

Unless it hardware failure and as long as the bios reports it as dma it will be driver related

 

Could be a fualty / incorrect ide cable then ? Is it the same on all IDE channels ??

 

dan, will fine out tomorrow matey. im thinking along the lines of faulty hardware tho.

 

noooooooooooooo, not faulty hardware my dad will be so pissed as its his pc