System slow as hell....

[Deadl0ck]

HI All,
i was having some problems with my system being slow, and I realised I hadn't installed the Via 4 in 1 chipset drivers on Wnidows XP. I assumed this would sort me out and I HAD planned on overclocking my system and I posted a Thread about it here

The system Specs are as follows:

Athlon XP3000+2.167Ghz Barton CPU
Asus A7V8X-X mobo
1 GB (2 X 512MB) PC3200 DDR 512MB RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Atlantis PRO 128MB Graphics Card

I had thought the system was pretty sluggish as sometimes the mouse is a bit stuttery/jumpy and apps can take overlong to start, however, my mate was over the other night and I was copying stuff off his Maxtor USB 2.0 HDD and it took 3 hours to copy 20GB of MP3s - WTF ???
That's when I thought about the 4 in 1 drivers, and the fact that the BIOS wa never updated

So, got home last night and booted up Windows (XP Pro) and it took about 4 minutes (pretty slow I reckon), downloaded the latest Via 4 in 1 drivers from viaarena.com and also, the latest BIOS from the manufacturer's site.

I updated everything and it's still bloody slow - I tried to copy a 1.4GB file to my USB 2.0 HDD and windows was predicting 15 minutes for the copy (BTW, one of the guys in work copied 50GB of MP3s from a Maxtor USB 2.0 HDD yesterday and it took 19 minutes).

If I go into device manager and check USB it has "USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller" and if I veiw by connection, I can see the external HDD is connected to this...

Finally, I had a look in my BIOS in case there's some weird setting about USB and I saw that my CPU temperature is at 65 C, and it's not an overclocked system.

Oh yeah, before anyone asks, I have sod all running on my system - nothing eating up the CPU cycles in the background. Memory usage is at about 180MB after boot up.

So - where to now ?
I plan to get some thermal paste and reseat the Heatsink on my CPU and the I'm gonna reinstall windows XP Pro and see how that goes...

Has anybody any other suggestions/ideas as to what the hell might be going on ?

[QSDT]

Did u Ctrl Alt Delete how many processes are running I've got 26. That temp seems high aswell what your Ambient temp? Anti virus isn't scaning is it?? And you do have the lastest driver hay. Hate the reinstall had to do that a few times to.

[Deadl0ck]

I'm not at home now so I can't check.. But from memory, no more that 20-25 processes, and System Idle Process was "consuming" most CPSU cycles (somewhere in the 90%-100% region)

[Morkin]

Windows Indexing Service?

M.

[Deadl0ck]

Disabled, as is system restore

[noob]

Did you get the USB setting fixed up? It is very slow - I transferred 19.8GB of MP3's from an iPod to HDD in 13min using USB2, flash drives will take alot longer than HDD's though (and yes I see you said HDD)

try getting more airflow in the case,

what HS and fan do you have?

you could try resetting it with new as5, or get a new better one, that will sort your temps.

Also onboard temps aren't all that accurate, a temp probe if you have one is much better

[Deadl0ck]

I Haven't been home yet to try out anything, but I bought an Artic-Cooler heatsink and fan yesterday and I'll install that first!

I'll keep y'all posted

[SkyDiver]

The first thing you need to do is lower your temperature. 65 degrees celcius is to hot. I have active programs running in the background and it has very little if any noticable effects on my system. Get your temp down and then we can go from there. I have a feeling (but not right now) that your MOBO or your WinXp is screwed and most likely gonna need to do a complete wipe of your drive by performing a low level format to clean out any residual files left over.

[Deadl0ck]

Update - The general slowness was caused by the HDD being stuck in PIO mode. I had to delete some registry keys to force XP to redetect and that set it back to DMA.
I've also installed an Arctic Cooler Heat sink and fan and that's reduced my CPU temp !

[hoinar]

Originally Posted by Deadl0ck

Update - The general slowness was caused by the HDD being stuck in PIO mode. I had to delete some registry keys to force XP to redetect and that set it back to DMA.
I've also installed an Arctic Cooler Heat sink and fan and that's reduced my CPU temp !

Good you solved your problem! DMA rullz If it happens again (Windows takes your hdd back to PIO mode, you might wanna check the Event Viewer for System events - errors writing to hdd or something similar. This could show you some harddisk errors.

[Rondog]

Difference between PIO and DMA?

[hoinar]

PIO: Stands for Programmed Input/Output. It is a method of moving data by sending control data through the CPU. There are different modes of PIO which specify the transfer rate. They go from mode 0 at 3.3 MBps all the way up to mode 4 at 16.6 MBps. A better alternative to PIO is DMA which most newer devices support. (PIO uses CPU cycles for transferring data).

DMA: Direct Memory Access/Addressing. A method of transferring data from one memory area to another without having to go through the central processing unit. Last mode used by hdds (UDMA 6 = ATA 133) permits a theoretical speed of 133 MBps. Though there are not such hdds