Poor IDE Performance (really bad)

[BonyTony]

I have just upgraded to xp pro from win me and my benchmarks for my IDE drive (80Gb Maxtor D740X (6L080J4) 7200rpm)have gone down through the floor i have used various tests and all the same its slow!,i can see it in windows it takes a second or two for it to minimize a window!!.

Ok now i have checked if its dma enabled and it is mode 5(ata100) also updated the latest via drivers for xp,all cables and hardware ok (been back to 98 and drive test back up) so it must be a windows setting.

Please help...my system is,

athlon xp1700,
cak38 cooler,
epox 8kha+ mb,
256crucial ddr ram,
maxtor hd,
asus 8200g3 deluxe card,
sony dvd,
24 liteon cdrw,
creative 5.1 sound card,
if anyone wants me to run other tests i will do so,

Try to leave a suggestion .....Thankyou.

ps i will check in every hour.

 

[Lonman]

Is your bios up-to-date?

 

[BonyTony]

Yes it is the latest from jan this year also i have optimized my bios,and tried it on safe settings as well same prob.

 

[Lonman]

I really don't have a good idea what the problem could be. You might try rolling back on the drivers/bios and see if that will help, sometimes it does. I don't think it's so much an XP glitch as it is a driver issue... VIA in particular. Have you tried the VIA Mini-port drivers to see if those will help your performance?

 

[BonyTony]

yes tried them,,,,,i think i will do a driver roll back,am i able to just reinstall xp over the top of it self just to get back to xps own drivers ?

 

[Lonman]

No need to reinstall XP. Open device manager, right click on your IDE controller driver(s), select the driver tab. There's a 'Roll Back Driver' button on that page... one of the cool features in XP.

 

[BonyTony]

thanks for your help,i will do just that but it will have to wait till later now downloading a big file but when its done i will do it and post what happens.

 

[scriptasylum]

I had something like that happen a while back and found one of my IDE cables was not quite fully connected on my other "backup" hard drive. It would take forever to browse the system or even come up with context menus.

The only way I knew I had a prob with the other drive was whe i tried to write to it. Device manager said all was good on my IDE sections. Then I rebooted and saw the drive name on my BIOS screen was all garbled.

Don't know if this will apply to you, but hope it helps...

 

[MiseryQ]

What programs are you using to bench?!? You said "various"...

I used Sandra2002,which you can find in a dead thread that know one wanted to respond to but I'm not bitter no I'm not, and it said that my Drive performace of my Raid drive was less that a single... Running HDtach, hdspeed and hd_speed all showed that the drive was running the way it should...

While checking it out, I found that the Via4in1 4.37 can make some systems slow down...


Take a look over at Viahardware.com... You might be able to find something specific...