[Solitaire]

I am a regular bit torrent user, so I usually end up downloading all sorts of clutter onto my computer. To alleviate the C drive, which has windows and all my programs and games on, I download all my junk onto a seperate drive.

I recently noticed that windows is a little slower than it used to be when opening files and displaying icons, in particular sometimes I will open a file and for a split second all the desktop icons will become the icon you get for an unknown file, then they go back to normal.

Could the seperate hard drive be slowing down my main drive with windows on it?

The windows drive is 120 gb NTFS, the secondary drive is a 60 GB drive partitioned into 3 20 GB partitions in fat32.

[UndyingClocker]

A little off topic but...

Ur name is Solitaire?? i have been using that name for every game/forum i post in/and everything else in the world lol.

[germanjulian]

if the two hard drive are on the same IDE channel it could slow down your access time to your primary windows hd. but the difference should always be minute.
I think its something else. Either windows is getting old and slowing down. ur windows partition is getting fragmented (or is heavily fragmented) or you have spyware...

[Solitaire]

Probably fragmented then... I have a tendency to be a bit sloppy in forgetting to empty recycle bin, uninstall demos and so on.

And they are on the same IDE channel as well.

^^ And I'm sure my name is just a coincidence, either that or I am one of your multiple personalities that comes out while you sleep and you know nothing about...

[tom10167]

Downloading tons of small files and then an occasional big file will fragment it for sure. Run a defrag in safe mode. Twice.

[Neo Demi]

ive had the same prob, two main drives on the same ide channel, and i use bitorrent ALL the time

defrag will help alot but only for a short time, then itll be just as bad again. best idea is to put the drive without windows on the same channel as your cd/dvd drive if like me you only have the one. that way the windows drive has a full channel to itself and the drive for storing all the stuff you acquire aint hogging bandwidth the same. the second drive should not be affected noticably speedwise unless you load large progs from it.

if you have two cd/dvd then this wont work though

[Vortexkrow]

One thing that could help is,
try deleting all the files in the Prefetch folder (C:\windows\prefetch)
and reboot

if it does improve the performance, turn it off in the registry

regedit,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro
l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

look for EnablePrefetcher and set it to 0

Good luck

[Sophisticated]

Get O&O Defragger and when u get in the program right click on one drive at a time if u have multiple drives and click stealth...then do the space method..then do the COMPLETE/Name method and the first method defrags your whole drive...then the space method what it does is move everything to the front of the drive also making it so there is no spaces in between any files...the complete/name method what it does is organizes your drive like a file cabinet which makes it easier and faster for the drive to pick out what it need instead of goin up down left and right search for the files it needs lol also it reduces wear and tear ...and it might take awhile for the first time but the second and so on will be alot faster since it wus already done....hope you git what im saying lol

also git Lavasoft Ad aware v1.05 and after make sure you do an update for the latest definitions...also get spysweeper and do the same...dont forget the antivirus

sorry for a bit of slang up top ..i do know how to spell..but anyways good luck

[ghettocomp]

I 'used' to use bittorrents for some downloads, but found that my drives would be so fragged at the end of 2-3 files. the best description I can think of it is that bittorrent files create a large empty file then proceeds to fill it, but that approach will fragment the drive badly. plus, every once in a while the 'torrent file is not really what it said it was and I got spyware with it. As many of the kind folks before me said: defrag, defrag, Scan for Spyware. and doing this in "safe mode at times will also help.

[deathman20]

Yup you got a couple solutions

1. Delete all programs not in use (just to clear some harddrive space up)
2. Remove all unnessisary files you don't want anymore
3. Run a Anti-Spyware software
4. Run Antivirus software
5. Run Anti-Spyware software again
6. Defrag Harddrive on bootup (I use diskkeeper and this is a tremendous help) mainly the file structure and make sure the swap file is in one location
7. Defrag Files (if u get software that can move files to certain parts of the disk i'd do that, putting something like the windows directory and such on the end/beginning part of the disk can decrease fragmentation to rest of files and increase preformance)

You might want to run the defragmenter a couple times though, expecially if you use the base one that comes with windows. It does a horrible job at defraggmenting tried it once and had over a 30% fragment left after 1 run, then used diskkeeper had 0% after it finished using that.

[Xtreme Barton]

couple of the best FREE programs are spybot 1.3 and hijackthis . also run defrag and then check disk scan for errors and bad clusters .. good luck

[gustav]

I use Bitorrent too but I download to a seperate drive. The drive in which I download to (the seperate one, no windows files on it) hardly gets fragmented at all, yet my windows has thousands of fragments after just one day. I'm not sure why. I don't use IDE, my Raptor which has windows and all my programs but nothing downloaded is on this drive. The other drive is a SATA Seagate 160GB drive which I use solely for downloads and saving stuff. My third hard drive which I use for testing out different operating systems or for want I last did which was slipstreaming SP2 into my xp cd and testing it out, this drive is on IDE and my DVD burner and DVD ROM are on the other IDE channel. But since my OS and Apps drive is on its own SATA channel, the other drive shouldnt slow it down, right? I was thinking maybe its because I have a ton of programs installed ( Program Files folder is about 22GB ). But I defrag it once a day and run an offline degfragmentation whenever I reboot. I also scan for spyware at least once a week with spybot, ad-aware, and spy sweeper, and for viruses with AVG and Norton, yet the system is still sluggish sometimes. I probably need a reformat because I use to reformat about every 2-3 months but its been 4-5 since my last reformat (no time to do it).

One thing that could help is,
try deleting all the files in the Prefetch folder (C:\windows\prefetch)
and reboot

if it does improve the performance, turn it off in the registry

regedit,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro
l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

look for EnablePrefetcher and set it to 0

Good luck

What does this do? Whats in the Prefetch folder and how does it help by clearing it out? I'm just curious as to what I'm doing before I do it.

[ghettocomp]

Another Thing to do if you leave your system running all the time is to set your defrag program to automatically defrag each night or at lease 1-2 times weekly, setting it for a time when you believe you will least expect to be using your system will be easier. Doing this has eliminated most of the fragmentation problems that I had.

[Solitaire]

Will it help if I get a USB external HD and download on to that? I am thinking that because it doesnt use IDE it might affect everything less.

[Xtreme Barton]

personally before buying anoither hard drive i would save all my data. then reinstall windows. update all drivers and make sure to set ide controller to dma and enable caching .. or why not just partition your 60gb drive for a windows install and use your giant drive for downloads ??