Okay cyber-whizzes -- I need your smartz!!

[showhost]

Hi all...

Bit of a newbie to all things technical so need your help on this. I have a computer that's about six years old. Asus P2L97 mobo with 266 mhz Pentium Pro processor, running Win 98 SE. Been working fine for a long while with a very small hard drive (I'm NOT a gamer). A friend offers me a 10 gig Maxtor drive to upgrade my system. I re-format his drive and simply copy and paste entire contents of my current drive to the new one (including OS). Now the thing runs like molasses. Takes forever to boot up, to open programs, in Word, I type a line and it doesn't appear on the screen for 5 seconds -- everything is just deathly slow.

So I do a little research on my own and discover that my mobo is a UDMA/33 and the new HD is UDMA/66. Not really sure what the significance of this is, but it seems that it's a mis-match, yes?

The question: Is there anything I can do short of buying a new mobo or processor to take advantage of the new HD without a huge expense. Is this a problem that can be addressed with a new BIOS or does anyone have any other suggestions? If you need more data on my system see below. Appreciate anything anyone can offer.

The tech guy at Asus (who didn't seem very knowledgeable said it's a dead end because board will limit data transfer to 33 mhz). I told him that speed was just fine when I had the old hard drive in but now it's 15 times slower! Any ideas?

BIOS Date: 12/2/97
BIOS Type: Award Modular v4.51 PG
Chipset: Intel 440EX/LX rev3
128 mb memory

Thanks,

SHOWHOST

[Chiguy]

I think a controller card might help.

[showhost]

Chiguy...

Please elaborate -- I'm a bit of a newbie.

Thanks

[Chiguy]

The Maxtor should be able to be run using UDMA 33, you will probably have to set this if it isn't UDMA 33. It may be in the BIOS or you may need to download hard drive utilities from Maxtor and enable it there. (I'm not sure about this with Maxtor drives, I know that Western Digital drives has this method avaliable)

[Chiguy]

Oh, a controller card is a seperate card that plugs into a expansion slot (Usually PCI nowadays), that controlls the hard drive. Rather than plugging the hard drive's ribbon cable onto the motherboard, you would plug it into this card instead. With this setup, the hard drive is controlled by the card rather than the motherboard.

[Chiguy]

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...troller%2Ccard

The first 5 products are examples of a controller card that you could possibly use in this case.

[showhost]

Chiguy...

Thanks for your help so far. If I go with the controller card, does this eliminate the need to use a utility that gears the UDMA/66 HD down to UDMA/33. Reason I ask is I found the utility on the Maxtor site that does this:

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/_100updt.htm

Also, can you check out this link and see if this product is the same as the controller card you are talking about. It's made by Maxtor:

http://www.maxstore.com/product.asp?sku=1856734

Seems the controller card does the opposite of the utility -- gears the mobo up to run at UDMA/66???

SHOWHOST

[RicheemxX]

please don't post more than one thread for your problem it creates a great deal of confusion. and please label your posts according to your problems.

[muno]

Nope, don't get a controller card.
The udma66 drive will work just fine with the udma33 controller.

What you may want to do is install fresh w98. (You should NEVER just copy entire hd to another one and expect it to work)
-M

[zen]

Exactly, why invest money in something already obsolete.
If you want to copy your hdd to another use Ghost(symantec).
Should work fine.