Tech PC Dilema

PC Dilema

So i had a drive in my PC which worked fine and everything but toward its end got screwed up pretty bad so i bought a new one and dropped it in there. 160 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM but now i'm having trouble with it. for one its slower than it was before response time wise. doing multiple operations reminds me of back in the day when i had a P3 500. here are the specs and programs i have on here

P4 2.4GHZ
1GB RAM
160 GB HDD
Win XP Pro
Adobe Acrobat 6 Prof. SP1a
Adobe Photoshop
Office 2003
Mozilla
Edit Plus 2
Flash MX
Visual C++ 6.0 with all MSDN Libraries and the SP6
and the drivers

Any suggestions

What are you talking about?? Are you saying DOS is better than Windows?? Multi-tasking is cool.

It shouldn't be noticable..my system is slower than that (P4 1.6a @ 2.133, 768mb RAM, 120Gb 7200rpm 8mb cache HD)..I can run multiple applications without any problem at all.

Have you formatted lately?

yea, maybe it's time to do some clean up.

a (re)format or even a defrag may be in order.

I put the drive in 2 days ago. I used to run off a 200 GB HDD and never had a proble. I can run multiple programs its just multiple operations now make it seem like its lagging. iono what exactly to do. i've heard multiple things. some one said its a bios thing but i dont see what it could be.

my co worker says its in the mb of cache. How much cache does that hd have ?

But then there is my theory. imagine droping a 2zz motor into a 350z. Imagine how slow that thing would be. But drop it into a Xa and it will zip around.

20gb hd 7200 rpm = really nice
300gb hd 7200rpm = really bad

lol thats just my thought on it. Plus those things just came out....

160 GB but only using the xp supported 137 at the moment with 9 mb cache, its improved a little after i defraged for like the 4 time in 3 days but its still a bit laggish

It really shouldn't be that much slower..

My 120gb with 8mb cache is just fine -- no noticable difference from my older 30gb / 2mb..

OK here's a update. i checked and checked and checked everything but here's the screwey part. when i turn on my PC it takes unusually long to come on and everything and once windows starts it gives me that popup saying windows has recovered form a serious error and there hasnt' even been a crash. other thing i noticed my HDD is not defaulting to DMA but to PIO instead. any way to change that?? i couldnt find anything.

Try this:

- Open the Device Manager. Right click on "My Computer", select the Hardware tab, and Select Device Manager.

- Expand "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and double-click on "Primary IDE Channel"

- Under the "Advanced Settings" tab, check the "Device 1" setting. More than likely, your current transfer mode is set to PIO. Windows 2000 sometimes does this as well. Usually right after adding a different hard drive.

- Set it to "DMA if available".

- Repeat the step for the "Secondary IDE Channel" if you have devices attached to it then reboot.

Make sure that you got the latest motherboard BIOS updates and all chipset drivers are good. You should be able to see more that the 137GB limit - as long as the motherboard isn't too old.

Good Luck.

ok, if your getting windows errors, its about time that you reinstall windows. you can try all you want to salvage what is left of it with the recovery console, but i really suggest you install a fresh copy of windows.
every month i reinstall windows, i can't stand when my computer slows down because of the system, i have an amd64 3000+ and i do alot of video and dvd work. hard drives fill up quick and things get slow.
also, defrag is your friend, i defrag at leat once a day. check out registry mechanic if you want to salvage your machine.