Help! System runs horrible and I've tried everything

[NaughtyNu 0]

1 Ghz Athlon

512 megs SDRAM 133Mhz

GF2 MX card

SB Live

20 gig Maxtor/40 gig WD drive

Windows XP

Clean Install

 

...still runs horrible.

 

Just before the weekend my system (which ran very very nicely) started to run badly. Booting up used to take a minute or so, which was replaced with a 5 minute brutal chug-a-thon. The hard drives would constantly access, bringing everything to a crawl. The mouse which I've noticed in XP always runs smoothly no matter what you're doing, stuttered and barely moves whenever I try to do anything such as open an ICQ window or hit the start button. The only thing I did was install the new Star Trek Bridge Commander demo. Nothing else.

 

Tried defragging the drive overnight. Congrats, this drive is fully defragged, dispite that the system is still struggling to do anything. So I formatted the partition and reinstalled.

 

Now...same thing.

 

First thing I did was disable the UPnP server, get Zone Alarm, do the Windows Update thing, changed virtual memory to 400 megs, grabbed Tweak XP, checked all the memory optimization settings and rebooted. Still runs badly with the hard drives chugging everything down.

 

Can anybody explain to me why it does this while my Win98 install in it's own partition runs perfectly fine? And can somebody explain to me why literally overnight this happened without me doing anything?

 

Anybody have any suggestions/ideas, keeping in mind that the settings I mentioned WERE running perfectly before and then the next morning it's all garbage?

[Dirty Harry 0]

-You have scanned for viruses, haven't you ?

-No new programs get loaded at startup ?

-Shareware that expired ?

-If the drives are on the same cable, check (one of a million...)

 

One safe bet; the odds are that this is caused by something you or another user has done and not by voddoo. So question that "I haven't done anything" or choose to believe in voddoo.

 

H.

[harplayer 0]

What errors are you gettin in the event viewer? Have you set up some counters? Who's Mobo? What Via drivers are you using? all that comes into play...Also try installing the OS on a freshly delpart.exe performed Western Digital drive, Create a partition with a 98 boot fdisk and install XP there. Delpart.exe the maxtor, create a partition there and move the pagefile to that drive only. I'm betting that the maxtor is a CompScrewUSAll drive. They never run right for me as system drives, I believe their cache set-up has something to do with it 8) 8)

[ChrisMOG 0]

See if DMA is enabled in WinXP. The only reason that I can think of that would cause the mouse cursor to skip when loading programs is your hds being in PIO mode. This uses 100% of ur cpu time to load programs from the hd into memory (which sucks). DMA bypasses the processor, and is one of the most wonderful things ever. Anyways, in XP if you don't know how to check if your drives are DMA, do this:

 

Right-Click MyComputer, goto Properties

Click the Hardware Tab, then the Device Manager Button

Select the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and expand it.

Right Click on the Primary IDE channel and select properties.

Select the Advanced Settings Tab.

 

This will tell you what mode your hds are running in. If its in PIO mode, then thats your problem. If they are in DMA mode, then its something else that I cannot diagnose yet.

[ChrisMOG 0]

Oh also I think there is some ghetto DMA mode that could also be causing problems, I forget what its called but its something really wierd. As long as it says Ultra DMA Mode (NUMBER) then I think your ok. Oh yeah..what MB do you have?