My hard drive performance has suddenly dipped! 1

[snipsspins]

Hi

I have a 80 western digital 7200 rpm EIDE hard drive. I recently did a performance test and compared to previous results and noticed that the Hard Drive's performance has radically dipped - by 75%! Any ideas why? - since the first test I have installed two programmes - iMesh and Norton System Works (I have fragmented useing norton since also). Could these programmes be to blame for such an extreme drop in performance?

Thanks

p.s. I have windows XP pro.

 

[wolluf]

Have you actually noticed a performance drop or is it just the figures from the test that are worrying you? (If machine still feels ok to you i wouldn't worry).

PS. Imesh can hog your internet connection (up and down).

 

[snipsspins]

I must admit the figures worry me more than any slight effect of performance. So I guess your right - I should leave it and not worry. But I might try uninstalling iMesh and do the test again - out of curiosity more than anything else.

Thanks

 

[gargouille]

Just going to imesh raised a flag for me...cydoor...spyware.
Get yourself some free spyware finding software...before you do anything else, and run it.
Norton may have some parts of the application running that don't need to be...and could be slowing down the hard drive, indeed the whole system.
In Win9X resources are limited to begin with and become less scarce when you add Norton anything to it.

 

[gargouille]

Pondering your predicament further...you also need to download some trojan detection...imesh is p2p transfer...and you can inherit some things in the downloaded files you don't want...many things you don't want, perzactly.
For free spyware finder Adaware:

http://lavasoft.de/downloads.html

For free trojan detector Spybot:

http://security.kolla.de/

There are others...these links were just handy.

Surely you have antivirus software?

 

[Grenage]

Indeed as said above, I'm always amazed how much people oftem fret over figures generated by "performance benchmarks". While these are normally fine unless you have actually seen your systems performance drop don't worry about it too much.

 

[snipsspins]

Excellent - thanks for your advice.

I will try the spyware out tonight - thanks for the links.

However, last night I did try something different which seems to have made a difference. Just before I did the test I had defragged the drive using Norton 2003 Utillities. So out of curiosity I defragged using the standard Windows XP programme last night and ran the test again - the results were much improved!!!

Does this mean the Norton defrag tool is inferior to that of windows? Although I thought it was meant to be better?!?!?.

 

[gargouille]

Hi snipspins:

The native WinXP defrag was written by the ppl who make Executive Software, a.k.a. Diskeeper. There are others who prefer Diskeeper Lite, which is free for personal use. I prefer the commercial version of it...and have used it for a long time. It allows a full defrag at boot time.
Started using it with NT 4.0...back when ppl used to say "you don't have to worry about defrag with NT".
Don't even get me started on Norton...I know lots of ppl who use their products and swear by them...but I'm not 1 of them.