Recent performance degradation

[Raye Cutsin]

This is an unusual problem and I haven't been able to figure it out.
All of the sudden, my XP MCE box has gotten noticeably slower. Let's
say I'm running Media Player and listening to a song. If I try to open
any program, Internet Explorer for example, the computer seems like
it's working very hard to do it, to the point where the music breaks
up and stops playing for up to a few seconds. It's as if the CPU is
being completely overloaded, which 1) isn't happening by the look of
the task manager, and 2) shouldn't be happening with a 2.8Ghz dual
core processor and 2GB of RAM. Even the Windows load music is choppy
when it never was before.

I've cleaned up the system, run malware scans and defragmented the
hard drive to no effect. Can you guys think of anything else I can do
to troubleshoot? I didn't have this problem a few months ago and I
haven't made any changes to the system that would affect performance
like that.

 

[Guest]

Raye,
If you find out something, let me know. I am also finding similar problems.
I have Pentium4 w/3GB processor and 1.5 GB RAM. Even after a clean install,
I don't have have the ability to multi task as I did when my computer was new
and I had less memory. When I go to taskmanager I see my CPU spikes from 2%
to 95%. So let me know if you find a solution.

 

[Raye Cutsin]

Raye,
If you find out something, let me know. I am also finding similar problems.
I have Pentium4 w/3GB processor and 1.5 GB RAM. Even after a clean install,
I don't have have the ability to multi task as I did when my computer was new
and I had less memory. When I go to taskmanager I see my CPU spikes from 2%
to 95%. So let me know if you find a solution.

I always laugh when I answer the question that I asked. I figured out
what it was, and with any luck, you have the same problem as I did. It
turns out that Windows will silently and automatically adjust your
your IDE channel settings "for safety reasons" if there are more than
six DMA timeouts. It had set my primary IDE channel to PIO mode
instead of Ultra DMA mode, and that's what was causing my slowness
across the board. Unfortunately, you can't change that particular
setting, so I uninstalled all of my IDE channels and rebooted to let
Windows use the default settings, which happen to be UDMA. It worked
like a charm.

I hope that fixes your problem too, djm.

 

[Guest]

I have tried the solutions available to restore DMA on my DVD drives and
nothing seems to work, I even found a fix that involved editing the registry
but this did not work either.
What would happen if I were to uninstal the following :-
ICH8 2port serial ATA Storage Controller 2825
ICH8 4 port serial ATA Storage Controller 2820 and then did a reboot.
I have repeatedly uninstalled and rebooted all Primary and Secondary
channels but nothing changes. Hard disk is DMA OK its only the DVD drives
that refuse to change.
Any suggestions please??