Noel said:
When I click on drive C: in Explorer it takes my machine ages to show the
file directory.
If I am in Internet Explorer and go to Bookmarks and hold my cursor over the
down arrow it moves at about 1 file per second.
These are the things I have rules out:
Hard drive has 44 Gb left on it
Internet Security shows no sign of viruses
I have run a registry cleaner
I also ran CCleaner.
I tested the memory but after hundreds of passes no fault was found.
I am no expert but I am wondering whether it could be a fault on the hard
drive or other hardware problem?
I use XP with SP2 on a Dell Dimension 2400.
Any suggestions welcomed.
Noel
To get some info on a hard drive, you can use HDTune.
http://www.hdtune.com/
The Info tab, shows the capabilities. For example, my IDE
drive shows "Supported: UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)" and
"Active: UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)", and that means
the interface is running at full speed. If there are
excessive CRC errors detected, Windows can slow the
active rate down to PIO mode, which achieves about
4MB/sec transfer rates, because the data is polled
transferred by the processor.
By running a transfer rate benchmark, you can also get
some ideas that way. My drive does 60MB/sec at the
beginning of the disk, and 40MB/sec near the end of the
disk. If the plot shows a flat line at 4MB/sec, that would
be PIO mode limiting the test results.
You can see similar information, by looking in Device
Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI controller, IDE Channel,
Advanced Setting, should show something like "DMA If Available".
If you see PIO instead, then Windows may have slowed the
interface down. The "Workaround" section here, suggests
how to (temporarily) fix it. The fix would be temporary,
if the underlying cause is still present (bad signal integrity,
or a problem with the drive itself). You can get a diagnostic
program from the disk drive manufacturer, if you suspect a
disk hardware problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472
For basic hardware info, a program like CPUZ allows a Windows
user, to check and verify the basics of their hardware (CPU
and memory info).
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
For comparison, there is some info on the Dimension 2400 here.
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim2400/en/sm_en/specs.htm
To benchmark a CPU, I use a program like this as a quick check.
You'd need to benchmark the system when it was working well, in
order to compare with performance later. The best result I've
got on my system, was SuperPI computing PI to 1 million digits,
in 45 seconds. With my antivirus software installed, and some
slight tweaks for stability, my system currently achieves
a time of 50 seconds (i.e. slower). My current P4 clock rate is
3.08GHz, for comparison to your own processor. (There is a site that
has thousands of benchmark results, hwbot.org, but finding
the info you want is not that easy.)
http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip (download)
http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/ (release notes)
Some P4 results.
http://www.hwbot.org/browseHardwareProcessors.do?cpuSubFamilyId=16
Naturally, there are lots of possible causes, and the
above doesn't really narrow them down that much. Another
test technique, is to boot a freshly installed OS or an
alternate OS, and see if the symptoms are present or not.
I use Ubuntu or Knoppix Linux LiveCDs as an alternate test
for hardware, as they don't need to install anything on
the hard drive, to work. Both of those are available as
a 700MB download, then you burn the ISO9660 image to a
CD. Then, boot the computer with the CD. You really
need high speed internet for such a download, and on my
crappy connection, it takes around an hour or so with a
good server.
Good luck,
Paul
