XP Pro HD Access Delay - Please Help!

[Paul]

Hey there everyone,

I'm at my wits end - i've trawled through the groups for weeks now,
tried everything I could find in an attempt to overcome this strange
issue, and nothing has worked.

So, the system:

Acer 1714SMi laptop

http://www.acernotebooks.co.uk/asp/spec.asp?V_ID=951

The above link gives you the gory details, but essentially:

Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz processor
1GB DDR RAM
120GB hard drive (partitioned during attempts to solve problem with
Partition Magic - 40GB NTFS | 40GB NTFS | 20GB FAT32 | 40GB NTFS)
DVD-RW / CDRW combo
Microsoft Windows XP Pro edition (Shipped with 'Home', upgraded later)

Here's the issue:

When working in any applications (MS Office XP, Adobe apps, MSN
Messenger...anything), playing any games - basically using the laptop
- the system intermittently pauses, there's a whirr of HD access, and
then it returns.

This means that i'm typing, the system pauses, and then the words
appear after a whir and 5 seconds. I click something, the system
pauses, a whir, then the menu appears. Something leaps at me in a
game, a pause, a whir from the HD, and then i'm back to battling for
my life.

I have what I think should be the best damn laptop i've ever had, but
the performance is atrocious. I mean, typing - hardly the most
demanding of tasks - and yet the system seems to need to access the HD
and delay the appearance of text on the screen.

I've toyed with Page file size and place, i've followed advice on
registry tweaks, i've stopped services, and gone through what seems to
be every single piece of advice offered to anyone who's posted a
similar problem on forums, and to no avail.

The one definitive characteristic I can put to the issue is that when
I use Performance Monitor, at the point the delay occurs I get a spike
in the Avg. Disk Queue Length - hitting a maximum of upto about 20 in
some cases. Many people post that this indicator should not exceed a
value of about 2, but when it comes to reducing this value all I find
is to increase RAM. At 1GB, even if the RAM were terrible, I should
surely not get this issue.

If anyone has any advice whatsoever on this issue it would be greatly
appreciated. Sorry for the length of the post, I wanted to try and
clarify as much as possible.

Thanks

 

[P_J_G]

Have you tried defragging the computer and running scan disk this will
at leats speeed it up a little bit. if that dosen't solve the problem
you may need to cahnge the bios settings bios settings, the setting
for the memory and hard drive are incorrect (don't know if it will
work but it's worth a try), Sorry can't help you any more

 

[Paul]

Thanks for the reply,

Have defragmented all drives to no avail. Will look into scandisk.
Have also entered the BIOS - which is pretty minimalistic to say the
least - there's precious little to modify, especially related to HD or
RAM.

Once again, thanks for replying. Has anyone any further ideas?

 

[Paul]

After months of searching, I stumbled upon a thread in Notebook
Forums, and found I was not the only one. Turns out that the system
shipped with a forced hard disk spin down after a certain length of
time - a setting configured at BIOS level, but with no option to
modify it. The only way that it was eventually fixed was through
persistent badgering of Acer from the guys at the forum resulting in
the eventual release of a BIOS update.

Got the update, installed, problem solved. Relief, as now I have a
system that runs as it's supposed to.

Cheers.