Replacing the hard drive of my PC...

[PaulB]

This is a long shot, but go into the Device Manager and look at the Properties for your Primary IDE Controller. Check that for Device 0, the Transfer Mode is set to something like "DMA Mode if Available". If it says something like "PIO Mode Only", change it to DMA or Ultra DMA.

 

XP has a bad habit (or at least it used to) of slowing down the transfer rate of UDMA hard drives if it encounters too many errors when reading from the device. The more errors it gets over time, the more it slows down the drive. It will never increase the transfer speed back to where it was originally.

[Gary_Yngve]

The speed of the harddrive is irrelevant. 4800 rpm vs 7200 rpm is just 1.5x. Of bigger concern is whether you have enough RAM so that you're reading RAM at 10ns or reading HD at 1ms (100000x slowdown). Another issue with the harddrive is that it might be up for a defrag (Windows has a defragmenter -- right click on C: and look for tools or management). Things are probably all messy in there, which means that the HD might have to make multiple seeks (>10ms) to find the next chunk instead of reading them in order (1ms).

 

btw - noticed how processor speed, memory, HD size, network speed, etc., has all increased 100x in the past 10 years, but HD speed is still the same? That's because there's only so fast you can mechanically spin something before bad things happen.

[Crux]

Snaffle drive deleted

Edited November 7, 2006 by Crux

[ClimbingPanther]

Whatever oly , that may be fine for you if you want a smooth computing experience with a fraction of the glitches of the average PC, but who wants that anyway?

[olyclimber]

I'm getting all hot about the new perpendicular drives!

[Chad_A]

Ok, so to recap...

 

Alex suggested Spybot, and Adaware. Have both of those, and they never find anything. I understand that an external drive may help out...but I'm trying to find out why it's not functioning normally.

 

Some other suggested more RAM, and this might help, but I have friends, and my g/f's computer, that run much faster than mine with the same RAM...and their's run much faster/smoother than mine, without the eterally-running HD that's doing nothing. I check the task manager, and seriously, there's no open applications running, except explorer, and even though there's a long list of processes "running", they're all at 0% of memory usage. The only one that jumps here and there is McAfee, and it's never very much. I wouldn't mind getting rid of some unwanted processes, but I don't know what some of them are.

 

I know that the Dell guy adjusted the automatic indexing to help out with the speed, but it didn't help anything. And I don't know what the hell a DLL is.

 

And, I did check Paul's suggestion...and it's already set at DMA when possible. Disk Defrag is run regularly, and doesn't seem to do make a difference.

[foraker]

Try typing in some of the names of the suspicious processes into Google. If it's a known spyware/malware/etc it should crop up and possibly some advice about what to do about it. This may not be the source of your problem, but it should help eliminate something.

[Chad_A]

Good deal. When I get a chance, soon, I'll give that a try.

[olyclimber]

check your page file usage when it is grinding away. performance tab in task manager. "PF Usage"

[Dr_Flush_Amazing]

Download "Hijack This" and run it. Post your log file with a description of your problem on http://forums.techguy.org/

 

Many expert computer folks there. They will guide you.

 

One of your RAM sticks could be bad, even though it says you have 512MB. I would recommend getting new, and more, RAM.

 

PCs are super cheap these days. Maybe it's time for a whole new machine?

 

Burn copies of your important files to CDs. Do not trust a single hard drive with stuff like pictures, important word docs, etc.