After you are sure that your PC is stable with SP2, I would suggest that
Thanks. Yes I have done both before but it doesn't help. Any other ideas `?
Double check that the drives are still using DMA. Open Device Manager,
under "IDE ATA/ATAPI COntrollers", look at properties|advanced settings
for both the primary and secondary drives. All four channels should have
"transfer mode" set to "DMA if available", and the line just below should
say "using XXXDMA mode YY" (preferable an ultra-dma mode, higher mode
number the better). Basically, the only drives that should revert to PIO
Mode are things like ZIP drives; HD's and CD-RW drives should all use DMA,
at least mult-word mode or better still Ultra-Mode.
Reboot and verify the change stuck.
After that, make sure you are allowing XP to perform the periodic "boot
time optimization". The Task Scheduler Service should NOT be disabled
(options | Stop using Task manager, or setting it's start-up type to
disabled; it should be Automatic). Check the \windows\prefetch folder to
validate that there are recent .pf files for the apps you use regularly
(these .pf files get made only when Scheduled Tasks Service is running).
There shoould also be a file in there called layout.ini, again w/ a recent
date. The date of layout.ini tells you when the last "Idle Tasks
Processing" too place (should be within the last 3 days, unless you rarely
leave your machine turned on and unused; see below for how to force this
processing to take place on-demand).
check this reg setting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session
Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
there should be a key there called EnablePrefetcher w/ a value of 3.
check this reg setting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
there should be a key there called Enable set to Y.
[there is another reg key that also controls "idle time defrag"; I can't
find it right now! But TweakUI and CacheMan both have a way to set/clear
this "hidden" reg key.].
Finally, force this optization to occur NOW by doing this:
start | run | rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks
wait for this to finish, it may take 10 minutes or more, but usually
it's just a minute or so. you should see that the layout.ini file gets
updated, and then you should see the disk drive defragment (in the
background). IF the defrag does not happen it's because you have that
hidden reg setting set to NO. In that case you can force the defrag to
happen manually by:
start | run | defrag -b c:
(subst your drive letter for c: the -b says to do the "boot opt"
defrag, which is quick, about 1 minute typically).
Note:
SOME defraggers (Perfect Disk comes to mind) DELIBERATLY disable the
idle-time optization defrag because they do it on their own, and do a
better job of it. If you have that installed you'll find the idletasks
processing is short, and just layout.ini gets updated w/o a defrag
occuring. Good, just go into PD and tell it to do the defrag right then.
it'll move all the files ID'd in layout.ini to the front of the drive.
Your next boot should be especially fast.
Good Luck.
P.S. You should also check all the other "obvious" stuff; do you have
"too many" services starting up at boot time? (services.msc) Are there
excessive things starting up in the background at boot time
(msconfig.exe, or better still the "startup control panel" by Mike Lin,
www.mlin.net).
