Pc slows down when HD is accessed

[Pill0ck]

Hi, twice i've gotten myself into this situation where during an installation of a game or program, the mouse pointer is extremely slow and if the game would include music during install.. that would sound disgustingly bad.

Even when i open up Winamp or a program that would need to use HD briefly, it will make the mouse extremely slow. After opening Winamp and playing some music, there's a brief stutter as it buffers the first portion of the track and anything i play sounds extremely bad!

Now, at first i thought it was a bad sound driver for my SB PCI128 but at the moment i've resorted to my onboard AC97/Soundblaster and the problem still exists.

Since i've formatted and reinstalled XP because i was unable to fix this problem, i'm really not too impressed to find that shortly after getting XP back up and re-installing all my devices.. this problem is still evident!! So i'm guessing this is a motherboard driver issue tut i have no idea how to fix it and am even considering moving back to WinME even though i'll miss the stability of XP

Please, if anyone has experienced this before please assist!

[palkot]

What are your system specs? CPU, ram? What you describe sounds like low memory.

If your system seems more than adequate, the next thing I'd do is a virus scan.

If you do consider an OS move, might I recommend going to Windows 2000. It has the NT stability that XP does, and is not so much of a resource hog. That is, if the problem is a slow processor or low memory.

[Pill0ck]

i'm using a Soltek SL75kav board with VIA apollo chipset and 1300mhz duron

512mb RAM

Geforce4 Mx440

SBPCI128 sound

Although this is a low-end system i've found it fine to run simple tasks like listening to music, watching movies, playing less system-intensive games. It's just recently that i've managed to screw things up with (probably) a bad driver installation order or something..!

I've tried to remove everything. gfx drivers, sound drivers, motherboard drivers, Direct x9 (done with a utility) but to no affect this hasn't helped at all so i'm really confused yet i just can't bare the thought of another format/install procedure!

[Pill0ck]

Oh, and regarding the virus scan, i'll go to housecall right now and see if it's possible to become infected approximately 12 hours after getting a system running.

I'll post back with an update

[Pill0ck]

"unable to run housecall because this web site hosting period has exipred" -Thanks housecall, right when i needed you.

I've just taken out all my devices and left the bare essentials (gfx card so i can write this)

I reset bios to defaults and i'm listening to some music using Winamp through my onboard sound (damn, i miss the quality of a PCI card) i'm quite happy doing this but i know if i try to multi-task it will screw up the sound completely

This is a basic, default install of xp with all it's default settings and although i don't really know what i can tweak relating to this issue i'm gonna play with some stuff anyway.

If anyone with a similar configuration to mine can tell me what PCI slots they have their stuff plugged into and possibly even tell me what IRQ's they have assigned to those devices it might be of help so i can attempt to copy it to some degree.

[classicsoftware]

Let's start with the first problem. The first step when troubleshooting a computer problem is NOT TO REINSTALL THE OS End of soap box speech.

1) Do you have the latest chip set drivers for your motherboard?

2) What is the make & model for your hard drive?

3) If it is UDMA 66 or greater are you using an 80 wire ribbon cable?

4) Have you downloaded the drive manufacturers diagnostic software?

5) Closing all apps, can you play a simple commercial music CD and get adequate sound?

6) Does Windows recognize all of your RAM.

7) Have you popped open task mamager when this happens to see what your memory and processor usage is when the slowdown occurs.

8) What file system are you using? If FAT32, when did you last defrag?

9) How much free space on your drive?

10) How big is your swapfile?

[jabarnutcase]

3) If it is UDMA 66 or greater are you using an 80 wire ribbon cable?
In addition to the other things mentioned by classicsoftware, I can't help but always have the DMA issue stick out in my mind.....Especially with XP, which for some reason has a knack for sometimes disabling DMA completely for your Drive.
(It will step down the DMA Mode in increments when it detects a problem....Sometimes when there is no problem!)


Sooooo- Just to be sure, go to Device Manager. Expand your IDE Controllers entry.
Now double click (or right click and select Properties) of your Primary IDE Channel.

Under the Advanced settings Tab, see if the current transfer Mode is some form of DMA.
If it is currently running under PIO Only, select "DMA if available".
If DMA is already selected but it is still running under PIO Mode, try "toggling"" the settings.

IE, select PIO then "OK", go back to DMA if available and "OK" again.
Sometimes this will "kick in" DMA Mode so to speak.
(I found this purely out of experimenting once, then much to my surprise, Microsoft actually suggested attempting the same "fix" in an article I read quite some time after that).

At any rate, there are other solutions, but if you are running "PIO only", that is certainly one explanation for lousy performance.

Those of you that have heard this speech from me before, sorry...I've just seen it happen too many times to not mention it! :p