[llamabob]

Not an overclocking ? and quite broad infact, but I got a lot of help here before about my MoBo and think you guys can help.

Basically my compter runs slower than dirt. Specs are
2400+ AMD Athlon
768MB DDR 333mhz RAM
KT-400 ANB MoBo FSB 133mhz
Radeon 9200

It runs terrible, took me 15+ minutes from start of reboot to when it was finishing loading everything. Programs take ages to open, games take forever to load etc.

Recap, all this was happening before I installed a new processor and RAM, hoping it would fix those problems. They helped a little, but not much. So I start looking into FSB and my Mobo was set at 100, so I set it to 133, the max the processor can handle, but less than the RAM could handle, but better than 100. No difference made at all.

I figure my OS is screwed, I just formatted(which took over 10 hours?!) my small 30gig HD, and reinstalled XP. It rebooted at fair speed until I installed my vid card drivers, do the mandatory reboot and it took 10min, leading me to right here typing this.

Is it possible some piece of hardware is damaged? Which could it possibly be?

My dad is gonna look at it tomorrow when he flies back home, but I hope to have some ideas. It irrtates me cus his computer has much less powerful hardware(not that mine is great stuff ) and it runs flawlessly, can even run my games better than my computer and he has a crap Vid Card. So something is wrong with my computer.

Any ideas? If you need more info I'll be happy to supply it.

[Avg]

I think your problem is going to be something related with your HDD. Check to make sure it isn't running in PIO mode instead of DMA.

[llamabob]

My HD is by far the oldest piece in my comp, could be it. How do I check if it's PIO or DMA?

[chr0nicles]

i agree with avg almost 100% sure ur hdd if u have those specs and you reformatted and took that long... how long did u have the hdd for and also did you overclock anything in the bios before the 100-133 deal

[Avg]

Go to system properties then to device manager, then expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, right click on via ide controller and click on properties go into the primary channel section and look what it says under transfer mode, it should say DMA. SOme of this stuff might be named differently on your pc.

[llamabob]

The HD is, let's see...ATLEAST 3 years old, but I would place it at 4-5. Cus my dad gave me the old family computer when I went to college, and we had that for a few years. Nothing was overclocked, just adjusted my Mobo fsb within normal limits.

[Avg]

Even if you get it fixed I would recommend getting a new HDD or backing up your data, MTBF of a hdd is 3 years last time I heard it, some last longer some die before three years but it is going to fail.

[chr0nicles]

heh while we are on the hardrive topic i still have a seagate 20gig hardrive w/ 2mb cache at 7200 rpm and its 60$ when i searched for prices?!?!?! i wonder y

[llamabob]

Yeah it's DMA

[illskills719]

did u fix it yet

[Avg]

Is the harddrive the only drive on the ide channel?

[llamabob]

Heh no, nothing to fix that I know of. Everyone here says it's probly the HD, and the guys on the Mobo board said the samething.

Guess I'll have to look into replacing it, now I gotta find somewhere to store all my important stuff I wanna keep.

Thanks for the help guys, and any more suggestions/ideas are welcomed even if it's the same answer.

[illskills719]

maybe u can try updating ur bios on ur mobo maybe?

[llamabob]

All I see under the previous thing you told me to look at is "Ultra DMA Mode 4" and I saw no other things installed that I can notice.

[Avg]

What I mean is, is there a CD/DVD-ROM drive on the same wire/channel as the HDD, or is the HDD on a ide wire by itself.

[llamabob]

Umm hard for me to answer, my Dad built it and my knowledge isn't so great.

If you mean physical wires, the HD is connected to the floppy drive by 3 wires, red, yellow, black, that run into the HD. A different set of 3, same colored, runs out of the HS and into the Mobo. However, an inch wide, flat, white wire I guess you can call it runs straight from the HD to the Mobo, it looks like a long strip of paper best way to explain it. Does this help?

[NetworkGuru]

Originally Posted by llamabob

Umm hard for me to answer, my Dad built it and my knowledge isn't so great.

If you mean physical wires, the HD is connected to the floppy drive by 3 wires, red, yellow, black, that run into the HD. A different set of 3, same colored, runs out of the HS and into the Mobo. However, an inch wide, flat, white wire I guess you can call it runs straight from the HD to the Mobo, it looks like a long strip of paper best way to explain it. Does this help?

lol, that's a pretty nice description. FYI, the red/yellow/black (it has 4 wires in fact, 2 are black) is the power cable from the power supply and the flat wire (IDE cable) is for data transfer between the drive and motherboard. What he was asking about was the IDE cable and from your description it looks like you hard drive is the only device on it. Check to see if that same cable also goes to the CD/DVD drive like this: Motherboard -> HDD -> CD or Motherboard -> CD -> HDD.

[Avg]

The colored ones provide power, while the wide cable is the ide wire, from what I can tell you only have the HDD connected to the primary channel (one Drive in the wire). Well I don't know anything else that could be wrong, since the problem percists after a fresh intall, we know it isn't software related, and the HDD isn't damaged otherwise it wouldnt' be working at all, what you could do is run a hdd benchmark and that will tell us for sure if your performance problem is coming from the HDD, download HDTach and run it then if you know how post the picture here.

[llamabob]

Unfortunately I don't have internet on my comp until tomorrow or Friday so I can't do that yet, and that program is too big for a floppy disk, and I don't have zinzip on my comp to zip/unzip it to make it fit.

From the sounds of what I hear and what I can find on the net, the long load waits are a sure sign of a failing HDD. I'll run that program tomorrow though and see what happens.

[llamabob]

Here is the result of my diagnostic, I can't read it, so have at it Good or bad?