Hard drive issues?

Switchblade

Switchblade

Geek Trainee
A while back i got my g/f my parents old computer. 1.1 ghz 320 (yes 320) mb ram, 20 and 40 gig hd's and my old geforce 4 graphics card. However after installing the graphics card ive noticed a slower than normal performance! Well it was never fast to begin with.
For example it takes stupidly long to access anything. Loading windows xp takes 10 minutes, bring up the menu causes the HD to work overtime.
Everything i do, the HD goes like the clappers. The whole reason i got this computer is so she can play WOW with me at the same time. It took stupidly long to install and patch the game. And once WOW finally loads its smooth so it CAN run it. When i say smooth im talking about graphics performance. but soon as i move the character the HD kicks in again and everything grinds to a halt. Its a bit like copying a 10 gig file from one HD to another and while its copying you try to do day to day things. Next to impossible.

does anyone know why its so god damn slow? And no upgrading isnt an option at the moment, i was hoping for some ideas.

Ive noticed i get the following msg on boot up: "ide channel no 80 conductor cable installed" but its not the HD side. Its the 2 cd roms she has. If i remove those the message goes but theres no performance increase. How odd.

Any suggestions?
 
Go into the CMOS setup and make sure UltraDMA is enabled or 'auto' for both IDE channels.

You should try defragmenting the hard drives as well
 
Well im at work now so i will try that later. But from memory i dont think the BIOS has the option to enable/disable that. I also defragged this morning. Im just at a loss.
 
Yep, mega is right... enable DMA.
However, when an HD starts churning continuesly it could means that RAM levels are too low. I think it is because the system starts relying on file paging (virtual memory).

I would follow Megamaced and enable DMA. You can also check in:
Start->Settings->Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager.
Expand the 'IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers'. Right click on the IDE channels available and go to Properties. Check the advanced settings. They should be set to DMA if available.

Other things to check: HDs are connected properly and jumpers settings are correct. HD's connected to primary IDE chanel and CD-ROM to secondary.
You have the most recent drivers for the G card.

Last - I would seriously conceder uping your RAM to at least 512MB.

Good luck!
 
Ok, well ive been thinking about upgrading the ram but i think its the older ram. Dimm? Simm? I can never remember! Pretty hard to find those im guessing!
 
Switchblade said:
Ok, well ive been thinking about upgrading the ram but i think its the older ram. Dimm? Simm? I can never remember! Pretty hard to find those im guessing!
Click to expand...

Assuming you are running a Pentium 3, then the RAM you need is DIMMs or PC100/133 SDRAM to be exact. To be honest though, I don't think the amount of RAM is the issue, unless you are running Windows XP with a lot of startup programs. I have a Pentium 3 850MHz with 384MB and it runs XP fine - pretty fast in fact! If you have a lot of programs running in the system tray, then obviously your computer will be short on available resources.

How big is your paging file? For 384MB of RAM, it should be set to minimum: 384MB, and maximum: 768MB
 
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