I have noticed that my system is running extremely slow . I have
upgraded my ram , and have done a few other upgrades like harddrive dvd
rom and dvd writer as well . It just seems to take so long to boot up
into windows and it seems to have slowed considerably , is there
perhaps some free software to test my motherboard and chip . I am
currently running a windows XP1800 which i believe is a 1.56 gig
processor on the A7A266 motherboard with 768 meg of ram .
Its gotten so bad that i don't dare and multi-task as its so slow
and laggy .
Any help would be great thx
Ed
I would expect to pay money, for a software that will point to
exactly one problem with your system, and tell you what to do.
There are a variety of utilities that will list your system
characteristics, but they require interpretation to figure out
what is busted. For example, "Everest Home Edition" from lavalys.com
is a free program. Sisoft Sandra is another one, but I haven't
kept up with whether there is a free version any more or not.
There are a few simple things that can slow a computer, and then
there are some more complicated things. For example, if the L1
and L2 cache on the processor were disabled, that would make CPU
intensive things very slow. If the disk interfaces have slipped
into PIO mode, their best transfer speed would be 4MB/sec, and
without DMA the processor is doing the data transfer a word at
a time. At the OS level, you could have indexing turned on, or
the OS could be reading all the files in a directory, to get
extended information about them. Those problems are a bit more
obscure.
If your drives are in PIO mode, I would consider placing the hard
drive on its own IDE cable (at the end of the cable). Use 80 wire
cables (the cables that use the finer wire), as they have better
data transmission characteristics, being careful to set the
jumpers on the drives as appropriate (master/slave/cable_select).
The optical disk drives can sit on their own cable. I'm only
suggesting this change, to try to isolate the problem to either
the hard disk, or the optical drives. (It could be that the interface
on one drive is adversely affecting the other drive.) Otherwise,
you should be able to mix the devices on a cable if you want.
This article discusses how Windows treats disk errors, and
how you can end up being "downshifted" to PIO mode:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472
"After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a
cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check
(CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the
transfer mode ) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode
to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive
time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer
mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode )."
Workaround:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware/msg/754224f4bbc59997
HTH,
Paul
