G
Guest
I booted up the morning to find that my PC had slowed to a crawl. It's
normally a very able and stable machine. Win XP/HE SP2, Athlon XP 2100+, 1
GB DDR RAM, etc
I thought it might be file corruption, so I used System Restore and then
Powerquest's Drive Image. The first time I used Drive Image (which has
always previously got me out of hot water) the system was as slow as it had
been before I used it but the second time took ages, 2.5 hours instead of 12
minutes! And bear in mind this was using the bootable CD environment i.e.
totally outside Windows.
Then when it rebooted I got STOP error 0000007B, which turns out to be a
bootable CD error. A trip to Safe Mode got me back in the next time without
doing anything but run AV and Spyware scans. These scans (repeated many
times) were all clean as a whistle. Booting then took a good 10 minutes,
slow by anyone's standards. Applications like Winamp hung and caused even
Task Manager to hang with apparent 100% cpu usage (as far as I could tell).
I checked the IDE properties and found that my main disk (250GB Maxtor
DiamondPlus 10) was registered as PIO !!! The second disk (60GB Maxtor
DiamondPlus 9) was UDMA 2. Both should have been UDMA 5. A 'quick' trawl
around newsgroups brought up the following possibility - when XP detects IO
errors it can ratchet disk performance down the modes (presumably to ensure
data integrity). This can't be reversed / reset. The experience with the
bootable disk disproves any theory that the problem might be software based.
Now here's the dilemma, is it the disks' fault? Both are slower than they
ought to be, the primary cripplingly so. Could it be a mobo fault
(controller?)? In which case would simply replacing the disks only replicate
the crisis? Do I replace both the disks and the mobo and what else besides or
am I barking up entirely the wrong tree?
Does anyone have a view on this? Your ideas are very welcome.
Steve
normally a very able and stable machine. Win XP/HE SP2, Athlon XP 2100+, 1
GB DDR RAM, etc
I thought it might be file corruption, so I used System Restore and then
Powerquest's Drive Image. The first time I used Drive Image (which has
always previously got me out of hot water) the system was as slow as it had
been before I used it but the second time took ages, 2.5 hours instead of 12
minutes! And bear in mind this was using the bootable CD environment i.e.
totally outside Windows.
Then when it rebooted I got STOP error 0000007B, which turns out to be a
bootable CD error. A trip to Safe Mode got me back in the next time without
doing anything but run AV and Spyware scans. These scans (repeated many
times) were all clean as a whistle. Booting then took a good 10 minutes,
slow by anyone's standards. Applications like Winamp hung and caused even
Task Manager to hang with apparent 100% cpu usage (as far as I could tell).
I checked the IDE properties and found that my main disk (250GB Maxtor
DiamondPlus 10) was registered as PIO !!! The second disk (60GB Maxtor
DiamondPlus 9) was UDMA 2. Both should have been UDMA 5. A 'quick' trawl
around newsgroups brought up the following possibility - when XP detects IO
errors it can ratchet disk performance down the modes (presumably to ensure
data integrity). This can't be reversed / reset. The experience with the
bootable disk disproves any theory that the problem might be software based.
Now here's the dilemma, is it the disks' fault? Both are slower than they
ought to be, the primary cripplingly so. Could it be a mobo fault
(controller?)? In which case would simply replacing the disks only replicate
the crisis? Do I replace both the disks and the mobo and what else besides or
am I barking up entirely the wrong tree?
Does anyone have a view on this? Your ideas are very welcome.
Steve