System Lag Issues

[Bryce W]

This one is bugging the hell out of me. Came across a system that is lagging pretty badly, its a modern PC (P3.2, 1gb ram) running XP SP2.

Within Windows, many operations are very slow. I noticed the computer had a bad partition and any time the computer tried to read off that partition it would lag for a while and say "disk could not be found" or something along those lines. I recovered the data off it and reformatted that drive to makeit good again. I originally thought the lagging was due to the computer trying to read that drive, but formatting it didnt help (note, this is not the OS drive).

The computer was originally very slow to boot up out in BIOS but then I took out an IDE controller and the boot time sped up significantly. However the OS still runs very slow.

Any ideas?

 

[iladelf]

Knuckles, I'll vote for a dying hard drive. If I'm to understand what you've tried, the only thing left to try is to put in a new drive, install Windows and see what happens.

What about the mobo itself; does it have any bad caps? Here's a website on that:

http://www.badcaps.net/

 

[greggh]

It sounds like a bad hard drive to me as well. I would try another hard drive, use acronis or something similar to image it over. If it all runs fast, thats the problem. If it doesnt then I would think its something to do with the motherboard, possibly bad caps as iladelf said.

 

[iladelf]

Ya know, gregg, in my experience, imaging the old drive to the new doesn't seem to work very well in situations like these. I had a customer who wished me to do so; although the PC ran "better", it still wasn't great. Further, got a call back not two months later about how things were "back to the way they were". At that point, I elected to install a new HDD (different than the two-month old replacement drive) with a fresh install of XP.

And viola! Problem solved. At least I haven't heard back from them. But those are the kind of customers you really don't want; the ones that end up costing you money and time to fix (obviously didn't charge her anything on the call back).

 

[Blues]

At 2 months I might charge them but I guess 90 days, or roughly 3 months, is maybe a better limit. Regardless time to get to the point of the issue I would suggest checking in device drivers to see how the drive is read. I doubt this PC has the same issue I had but I put in a drive that was simi compatible and ended up running in a slow antiquated read method. When I "fixed" the drive it ran at the right speeds but was recognized as a SCSI shortly after the MBR got fubar managed to retrieve files and then bought a truely compatible HDD. My point is check what windows is seeing it as and how its reading and writing and if it looks wrong try driver updates for the controller and/or the drive.

 

[Simmy]

How fast is the hard drive running? Use a program like HDtune to find out how quickly data is being read from/written to the hard drive. Let us know your findings

 

[Bryce W]

I'll give these a shot and report back. Im suspecting hard drive as the first possibly, and motherboard second (as it doesn't boot up all that fast either).