mystery bottleneck

[DollyDagger]

hi,

I have:

Asus k7vza m/b
Amd ath 950
IBM deckstar dlta-307030
LG cdrw
128- 133mhz sdram
geforce2 mx
windows ME

Generally what should be a pretty fast system, but - its really slow!

Well not quite, but it takes _ages_ to load things.
According to the label on the hd itself, it is 7200rpm, but whenever i go on a friend's computer with a lower spec but with a 7200rpm hd it loads things a lot faster. the weird thing is on the receipt from the shop i bought it from, it sez the hd is 5200rpm.

eg, when i put a cd in and open "my computer" the cddrives delays it a bit while spinning up, but then there is another delay while the hd reads.

Any ideas why its so slow?

ps. in device manager, it sez the HD drive requires no drivers, and the drive is named Generic IDE ...

thx. "I didn't do it"

 

[DollyDagger]

Like I said before, the bios detects the drive fine - when booting up it comes up with :
"
detecting IDE devices:

pri master: IBM-DLTA-307030
pri slave : none
etc
"

The problem is when in windows it doesnt detect this as the HD. "I didn't do it"

 

[jgoodman00]

I am afraid that sounds like your windows installation is knackered. As a last thought though, have you looked in System properties, to check that the correct HDD controllers & correct HDD are installed. Hypothetically, if you had somehow changed to HDD controller to an incompatible one windows would no longer be able to find the HDD itself..... James Goodman
j.goodman00@btinternet.com

 

[DollyDagger]

Yeah, i checked the controllers before.... lloks like i'll have to bloody my nose for microsoft, again. Of course i ... will... yes... hm pay.

Thanks anyway. "I didn't do it"

 

[ShaithisDanoveur]

Before you reinstall, try booting into safe mode, deleting the drive AND the controller from safe mode, reboot and let Windows re-recognize it.

If that doesn't work, rather than blowing everything away, you can try the hardware tree rebuild.

To do this, boot from a Windows ME EBD. Select CDRom support.

At the prompt, change to the CD drive.

Type

SETUP /P F

Put in the key when it asks and accept the defaults.

This will retain everything you've got in Windows without forcing you to reinstall everything.

Of course, this WILL require you to have a working Windows ME CD.


Something else that will affect speed - partitioning. If you split that drive into smaller partitions instead of one big one it will be faster.

Just a thought.