System bogging after installation of new hard drive

[billyrzx2]

Hey techies,
I recently installed my new 80 GB hard drive and a 52x speed cd burner. The hardware reads fine after tweaking with jumpers and what not, but my system is seemingly very slow, taking much longer to load any window then it should. Here are my specs, and installation info:

MSI K4N2 Delta Athlon XP motherboard
Athlon XP 2600+ 2.08 GHZ processor
4x DVD-ROM DRIVE
Quantum Fireball 13.8 GB HD
512 MB DDR RAM

After installation of new hard drive and cd-burner here are the current settings w/ locations:

MASTER Primary: Quantom Fireball 13.8 GB HD
Slave Primary: Maxtor 80GB 7200 RPM HD
MASTER Secondary: 4x DVD-ROM DRIVE
Slave Secondary: 52x CD-burner (Replaced 4x cd-burner)

Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks

[Martoch]

Welcome to TechIMO!!!


I'll assume this is an XP box...have you checked out these links yet?
http://www.tweakxp.com/performance_tweaks.aspx
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/cust-idx.html
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm
-Mike

[billyrzx2]

well my computer was running just fine before installing these drives (yes i have XP good guess ), and now that they are installed, my system is just not running right (windows don't load quickly, mouse overs on buttons are slow, etc.)

[J-Excel]

Check in Device Manager to see if the IDE channel is in DMA or PIO mode. It should be DMA.

[billyrzx2]

ok checked that... seemed ok..... if i tried a different IDE cable would that have any effect?

[John Prophet]

I know its sort of caveman advice....but have you tried to take them back out again and see if it speeds back up?? lol.

You could try that and then if it did speed up, just put back on eof them at a time and see if either particular one slows it down.

Also a thought is that maybe the speed of the 13g drive slows down the 80g...like maybe the 13g is ata 33 so that is all the 80g will run at also...(but that shouldnt cause what you are experiencing)

a weird problem.

[Omardeth]

i have found that sometimes when you slave a wd drive in a system it does this . why i don't know but i have had this problem myself . if i took the slaved drive out to runs fine ,

[billyrzx2]

well now the problem is the fact that the system starts to slow down after a few hours of being on.... it's incredibly fast starting out but say if i came back from 4 hours of classes, or when i wake up in the morning, the computer is practically frozen... things take 10 minutes literally to show any signs of operation so i just power it down manually.... i hope that just switching the HD's in the IDE channel will help

[thronka]

I always keep the faster drives on the primary ide and the SLOW ones on the secondary ide (meaning optical and old HDs)

[billyrzx2]

i tried that as well but yet it still does the same things.... im gonna format both hard drives and put XP on my new hard drive... see what happens.