Hard Drive runs and runs: Want your advice before I upgrade. 1

[newyorkny]

Tippers,

So it's a case of the doctor who couldn't cure himself: my own home office computer has what seems to be a very hosed-up install of XPP SP3. Computer is two years old, and over the past year the performance under Windows has slowed to a snail's crawl. The overall question is, do I try one more time to fix, or should I take the plunge and upgrade to Win7, or maybe should I even just do a clean re-install of XPP?

Computer is a Dell XPS M2010 with T2500 at 2Ghz, 4GB RAM. It has two hard-drives: the Windows install is on C, which is only 80GB or so. I have another 250GB drive in the other bay.

The symptoms are a 10-15 minute (!!!!!) bootup time. A 4 minute wait to load Outlook. A 1 minute wait to load Firefox, etc. Constant disk activity when Outlook does send/receive. Lots of hourglass situations when receiving mail and in other situations.

Here are some of the things I've done:

* Used multiple applications to sweep for virii and spyware, malware. The machine is clean of bugs. At one point I suspected this might be the problem. It is not. I run an AV program (that doesn't take up much CPU or disk so that's not the prob either).

* I did a repair install of XPP. Had no effect.

* Did complete defrag, tried running Diskeeper advanced defrag, and did diagnostics on the disks. Had no effect. C drive is a little low on space at about 12% free.

* Routinely cleanout the registry. Had no effect.

* Cleaned-out msconfig and startup processes and programs. Had no effect.

* Ran BootVis and got no particular insight as to what's causing the slowdown.

* I tried tricks and tweaks I think are of questionable value but which have popular cred, like clearing out pre-fetch. Nope.

* I disabled Windows indexing. Uh uh. Didn't much help.

* Tried running Windows without Outlook to see if the largish PST file was the culprit. It didn't have much effect.

* Set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction to Y...although I note it says "insufficient free space." Will address that.

So, in the event that the last item fails to improve performance dramatically, does anyone:

1) Think there is hope of salvaging this install? I would prefer not to have to reinstall all the software I use.

2) Think I should upgrade to Win7? I am perfectly willing to cough up the dough to make this computer function normally.

3) Think an XPP clean install is the way to go?

I am at the end of my tether and would appreciate any perspectives on this.

Many thanks,

NY

 

[goombawaho]

If hard drives are PATA, check to see if your drive is running in PIO mode. That will make it run about 25% of normal speed and make you want to jump off a building.

If SATA, check if the drive supports NCQ and the motherboard controller does not.

 

[BadBigBen]

The following article explains it in depth and provides a fix for it...

DMA reverts to PIO
The stuttering DVD drive or the lame hard disk

http://winhlp.com/node/10

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[newyorkny]

Goomba,

Thanks--I had done that check somewhere along the way but was certainly worth another look. Device 0 (boot disk presumably) is in Current Disk Mode: UltraDMA Mode. Device 1 says "Not Applicable." Both are set to "DMA if available."

That looks ok.

Thanks again.

NY

 

[MasterRacker]

You could try a benchmarking test like PassMark (30 day free eval.). You might gain some insight into what component is the problem.

Did you try a full safe mode boot?

If you do decide to go the Win7 route, I would do a XP reinstall first to make sure you don't have a hardware problem before spending the money on Win7. You'd have decided to wipe the machine anyway so you'd only be out a little more time.

Jeff
[small][purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day
"The software I buy sucks, The software I write sucks. It's time to give up and have a beer..." - Me[/small]

 

[kjv1611]

If it's this:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfh/notebooks/xpsnb_m2010/pd.aspx?refid=xpsnb_m2010&cs=22&s=dfh

Then the drives are SATA drives, in case that helps anyone - I don't recall anyone saying it WAS SATA or it WAS PATA for the hard drives..

To the issues at hand:
1. Did you change any RAID/Non-RAID settings for your hard drives before this began occuring?
2. Have you scanned the system hard drive with 3rd party software to make sure it isn't failing?
3. Have you disconnected your data drive (assuming Windows and program files on one, data on other), and tried with just your system drive?
4. Have you tried a LiveCD version of Linux or something along those lines, to take the hard drive(s) out of the equation all together?

It's possible it's the OS, but I really am thinking it's the hard drive.

I agree you should make sure of no hardware issues before buying Windows 7.

Personally, whether the hard drive is the culprit or not, you could get a new hard drive, and get better performance, regardless. This is my personal favorite right now:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0&cm_re=wd_320gb_black-_-22-136-280-_-Product

I've put it (and the alternative, with included free-fall sensor) in a few laptops, including my own, and my what a difference that hard drive makes.

You could download the Ultimate Boot CD if you like, and burn it to a blank CD, boot from it, and run hard drive and memory tests from there. I really am thinking it's the hard drive, myself... could be wrong, as I'm just going based on what you've told us so far.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[newyorkny]

Ok, thanks for everyone's posts, which have been most helpful.

The following update may prove interesting. Per Jeff's suggestion, I downloaded the trial version of PassMark (which I would like to note gratefully is truly fully-functional, and not a hobbled version).

The score my machine received was pretty bad: 590. I found another XPS-M2010...and its performance was bad, too.

As predicted, the disk score was rotten. But it was exactly in line with the other Dell. A Lenovo of similar vintage and configuration had double the performance of the Dells' (plural) disk operations.

I may just look into kjv's suggestion about a new disk drive. Couldn't hurt at this stage.

Many thanks.

NY

 

[kjv1611]

Some of the drives they put in the laptops from the manufacturers are pretty pitiful. For instance, I just swapped out a Hitachi 5400 RPM 160GB from an XPS M1530 for one of the WD Black 320GB drives I mentioned, and WOW what a difference! I've done the same with that exact hard drive in other systems over the past year.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[newyorkny]

Ok, so today was my day finally to deal with this problem. After thinking about everything on this page, I phoned Dell support. They acknowledged there was a faulty drive issue and are sending me another, and they will also rebuild XPP for me (they said they don't have pre-imaged drives with XPP anymore, so the onsite technician is going to be at my place for quite a while...)

They no longer have this puny drive, so are sending me something else, but I wasn't able to discern what it is--hopefully not more junk.

Anyway, in addition to thanking the board for the help, I thought it only fair that I give props to Dell.

NY

 

[kjv1611]

Well, I HAVE seen where Dell is using that same hard drive in some of their laptops, apparently. So maybe you'll get that one out of the deal. I know I'd sure be happy if it were me!

Well, just out of curiosity, let us know how it goes. Oh, and if a guy is coming out to reinstall everything, I'd personally suggest begging him to leave off all the 3rd party junk... maybe go ahead and install the DVD player software if you like that, or whatever you know you'll use, but otherwise, put all your own choices on there..

Here's a good site I've found of late that will isntall many of the free things for you if you want, automatically... you just click through a list of what you prefer, then it gives you a download link, and you download it, run it, and it downlaods the latest of each program, installs it, and tells you when finished:

http://www.ninite.com

I like it A LOT. It was a great idea - something I'd thought about, but never took the time to try anything close.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[mscallisto]

* Did complete defrag, tried running Diskeeper advanced defrag, and did diagnostics on the disks. Had no effect. C drive is a little low on space at about 12% free.

Before the defrag did you remove "temp" files?

If you have megabytes of small temp file spaces cluttering your drive it prohibits defrag from doing a good job.

Also remove all obsolete or unwanted software before defrag.

Only when your drive is free of unnecessary stuff will defrag produce the best results.

sam

 

[newyorkny]

MS,

Thx-I run both ccleaner and alternately a suite called WinUtilities to keep the disks clean. Not only do temp files barely have a chance to get comfortable before they're scooped up, but the registry is vacuumed weekly. As for unwanted programs, I do have a lot of software, but I have trimmed down anything that doesn't need to be there. To the bone.

Slightly OT, but after thinking about it, I am not that comfortable giving props to Dell tech support.

What I didn't tell you is that there was a service call three months ago where X part was backordered and the lack of this replacement part meant the fancy wireless keyboard (which I love) stopped working. I never heard another peep from Dell until I called them about THIS issue. Boo. Hiss.

NY

 

[goombawaho]

You can't take props back - that's a rule. It's out of the bag and into the universe.

I ran into a similar problem last week where a hard drive would go into PIO mode while in Safe Mode (every time). It was driving me nuts because I needed safe mode to remove the malware, but safe mode was mercilessly slow and painful. Crappy HP desktop. Ended up letting it scan the drive (OVERNIGHT) and coming back to see the results. Not sure of why that would be but not trying to jack the thread.

 

[newyorkny]

I can so take back props!! Ok, so here is the update. The tech came today and was pretty efficient. The drive indeed had XP pre-installed, and it had kind of a neat self-configuration script that got it most of the way home in terms of setup. They gave me a 160GB 5400RPM model that probably wouldn't be at the top of your Christmas list, but the system is blazing fast again.

I nuked the old drive from orbit with dban because...well just because.

I am going to reinstall the image I had. If the machine gets slow, we'll know the XPP install was hosed, and I've lost nothing except an hour: I can just reinstall the clean XPP.

They gave me a new BT adapter, but the keyboard is dead as a doornail. I guess it's the battery this time.

But this should be a most interesting experiment. I will also run the checkup program out of curiosity to see how the machine is performing now in terms of disk scores.

NY

 

[newyorkny]

Ok, so I compared the PassMark results: the computer now turns in a 42% better disk score than it did before, and a 130 point better overall performance.

I am going to give a star to kjv for the new drive suggestion (although everyone in the thread deserves a star!)

Thanks everyone.

NY

 

[BadBigBen]

Glad you got it sorted, in the end... and you deserve a star as well, for posting back with what fixed it for you...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

No star for you. He tried to pull props back even while Dell was working their fingers to the bone.