Explorer.exe problem.

psd99

psd99

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At the moment I got four hard drives in this machine.
It is a Gigabyte pro n7200 motherboard with xp3200 and 1gb of memory.

Four hardrives are as follows:

IDE 0: Samsung 250gb
IDE 1: Seagate 160gb


Sata 0: Samsung 250gb (Operating system installed)
Sata 1: Samsung 500gb (all of my data on here including media)



So the problem is that when I am playing music from the 500gb hard drive it will work fine no problem.
But as soon as I open up windows explorer and start to explore in this hard drive and go into different folders the music starts to become choppy. It cuts up. The same applies to videos. But I noticed that this only happens when I am looking in this 500gb hard drive. I can look in any other one and the music will not stop and start if that makes sense.

I looked in task manager and explore.exe has a cpu usage of 90%, which I think is pretty high.
Also the memory allocation is something like 36k for this operation. I understand this is needed in order to make windows work. I did end this operation and restart it but same problem. I even restarted PC a few times.

Do you think this is a software or a hardware problem?

I am due to install windows again very soon, but really worry if this has anything to do with the hard drive itself. I spent a lot of money on this.

Any ideas to a solution?


thanks

psd99
 
p.s I dont notice any other problems on the machine and I did try using Itunes but the same problem again. :(
 
not sure to which of the other hard drives you refer..

but here's this; ide drives (and maybe sata, which is serial ata, that is serial ide - pata is parallel ata or parallel ide) chen they are on the same bus are fighting for its use. so moving info from one drive on the same bus as the other causes a real bottle neck and choking point.

this is why installing programs from a cd drive on the same bus as the hard drive is so doggon slow.

you may notice that going from the pata pair to the sata pair is quick; they are not in contention for bus usage.

that is why the cpu usage is so high, and why there is no computing cycles left to play the music smoothly.

=========
ps
try setting your swap file very small, like 100 or 200 mb for both min and max (i.e. it will be static and never change; the os won't try to alter its size for no good reason.)
r click my pc, properties, advanced, performance, advanced, virtual memory.
that will not eliminate the bus contention problem, but will speed up your pc.

==========
pps

r click my computer, properites, hardware, device manager, ide channel, advanced, transfer mode: dma

dma - direct memory access - very fast
 
thansk for replying.

the problem is with the 500gb sata drive that is on sata channel 2

the operating system is on normal ide channel 1.

hope that makes sense

im due to install windows again i hope this problem goes away
bt somehow i dont think it will ::(:(:(:(:(:
 
going to resintall windows!

hope it solves the problem! it is so frustrating
 
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