Andy_XP_Devotee said:
I still need to work on some of the material Paul gave me, but Paul pretty
much said (nicely) that I needed a new drive! Maybe you would agree?
I noted the slight scattering of seek times on your C: drive. It
doesn't mean anything is broken. Your transfer rate curves look
head limited (so working properly). I suggested a new drive,
as a way to improve the performance a bit. If the computer is
behaving like a slug, there could well be another problem we
haven't detected yet. It is much easier to work on these
things, when you can actually see the system, and what aspect
of it is sluglike.
To give an example, there is one motherboard, using an SIS
chipset, where every attempt to reach a drive off the Southbridge,
results in a five second delay. During that time, there is no
activity detectable in Task Manager. It is like the read
request gets lost, somewhere at the driver versus hardware
level, and once you wait the timeout interval (5 seconds),
a second command is issued, and it is always successful. Which
suggests sloppy programming by SIS. Now, those symptoms are
very annoying, and I never actually did hear of someone
fixing it. That is an example, where you have to distinguish
between slow transfer performance, and an outright communications
problem.
Try some more benchmarks, and see if you can isolate which subsystem
seems to have the most impact.
A new drive for C:, could perk up your storage performance a bit,
but if some other thing is causing a problem, you still might not
be very happy.
Some fun tools (like owning a screwdriver or pliers), are things
like Process Explorer and Process Monitor. Explorer will give
you an overview of your system. I've used the Monitor program,
to figure out what registry entries an errant program might be
looking for.
Process Explorer
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Process Monitor
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
http://www.sysinternals.com [was acquired by Microsoft]
Note that some AV programs, don't like tools like that, because
they access things that can trip heuristic malware protection.
On my other machine, Kaspersky would freeze the whole computer,
and need a reboot, if I use tools like that. So if you test
those programs, close other programs the first time you try it,
so you don't lose any work. For each program that doesn't
trip your AV software, place a text file in the folder containing
the tool, that says it is "safe". That way, you'll be able to
keep track of each Sysinternals program, that plays nice with
the rest of your ecosystem.
Paul
