Slooooow HD I/O

H

Harry

Recently the hard disk I/O has become noticeable slower.
I just did a disk cleanup and am now in the process of
doing a defrag. The only thing that caught my eye was the
size of the MyPictures folder:

Total space: 4.5GB
Total files: 10,822
Total folders: 167

This is my wife's PC (1.3GHz HP Pavilion; 60GB HD) and she
is really getting into the digital photography stuff. I'm
wondering if we're approaching somekind of file system
(FAT32) limitation.

Thanks for your time.

Harry
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Hey Harry,

Check the speed of the disk in device manager

control panel/system/hardware/device manager

Sometimes xp seems to reset the disk to pio instead of using UDMA.

Click the + sign next to "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers

Double click on "Primary ide channel" and select the "Advanced Settings"
Tab.
Make sure that Both devices are set to "Auto Detection", this may be greyed
out and set to Autodetection so is not changeable.
Make sure both have Transfer Mode : DMA if available.

Whichever Device is your hard disk, if its an ATA100 it should show, Ultra
DMA Mode 5 if its running at top speed. A cd will show PIO or perhaps Multi
Word DMA mode 2.

Do the same checks on secondary ide channel.

What does it show for your hard disk in "Current Transfer Mode" ?

Also check the system event log to see if there are any disk timeouts or crc
errors, the disk may be going bad, and xp is having to reread data before it
gets it without errors.

click start
click run
key in "eventvwr.msc" without the quotes

Click on system in the left pane.

Check events in right pane, specifically for disk or file system related
errors marked by a white cross on a red circle.

I should ask, why are you running with a FAT32 file system and not an NTFS
file system ?

Paul
 
H

Harry

Paul

Thanks for the tips -- I'll check out that stuff as soon
as my defrag finishes.

I originally had WinME on that system -- boy did that
STINK -- it progressively locked up more and more (power-
button type halts) such that toward the end we'd spend
more time re-booting the PC than actually using the PC.
Anyway, when I did the WinXP Pro upgrade, there were quite
a few major compatibility warnings in "disclaimer" doc
that XP spits out just before you mash the do-it button,
and since the FAT32-to-NTFS was a one-way street, I got
nervous about committing to that conversion until after
the fact. I'm close to doing that conversion at this
point (it's been a couple of months)... once I figure out
this performance issue, I'll probably convert to NTFS.

Thanks for your input.

Harry
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

If you installed windows xp over the top of ME I'd recommend that you do a
clean install of XP provided you have the means to backup all your personal
data.

I wouldn't do an inplace conversion from fat32 to ntfs if I could avoid it,
and I'd definitely backup everything first !

Paul
 
G

Guest

Paul

Thanks for your tips -- I'm doing the defrag at the
moment -- this will chug for another hour or so, then I'll
checkout your tips.

As I recall, the HD is UltraDMA, but I think it's a Mode-4
type of drive.

The FAT32 kept during the upgrade from WinME, since that
was a one-way deal... and I was not completely certain
that I would not have to backoff the XP upgrade.

Harry
 
G

Guest

Paul

Two things:

(1) I'm not sure if the WinXP Pro upgrade CD will allow
you to do a naked (OEM-like) install (?)

(2) I think I'd be overwhelmed with CD's if I had to
backup everything -- got a ton of downloaded software and
another ton of photo images... so I think I'll take a
chance on the in-place conversion -- I think it's
called "convert" or something like that.

Harry
 
G

Guest

Paul

As I recall from talking with the HP people, the Mode-5
functionality was added to the ATA/100 spec subsequent to
the creation of my particular drive/controller/whatever.

Harry
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Hey Harry,

Hard disks are cheap these days, treat yourself ! If your wife is into photo
imaging, you'll soon need a bigger disk anyway :)

You should be able to do a clean install with the upgrade CD, it will prompt
during the install process for a qualifying product, at which point you
shove in the ME cd for it to look at or a 98 cd.

Paul
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

ATA66 sounds right.
By the way, are you using an 80 wire cable which for ata66 and aboce, you
should be.
Did you check the sysem event log ?

Paul
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

You may indeed have some adware and nasty ware.

This is my spybot link
http://www.safer-networking.org/

Adaware is a complimentary tool

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/

To be honest, my firewall and av software have never let any of this kind of
thing through so I've never run them. I'll get around to playing with them
sometime.

As you have windows xp pro professional
Go to a command prompt

and run the command

tasklist |sort > c:\tasks.txt

This runs the tasklist command, sorts the output alphabetically and stores
it in a file instead of sending it to the screen, its the same list you see
in taskmanager.

That vertical bar is the pipe symbol, its located on the backslash key
diagonally opposite the left hand ctrl key. Theres a space after the
tasklist command, but not after the pipe symbol

Open tasks.txt with notepad and choose edit from the menu, then select all,
right click on the highlighted text and select copy,

Now paste the list of tasks into a reply post,

Right click in the post area and click paste.

appologies if I've gone into too low a level of instructions.

I'll have a quick look at your tasks and see if anything appears that
shouldn't be there.

Paul
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Thats an awfully long time !
Do you mean its 60% complete ?

One of the problems with the built in defragmentation tool is that it
doesn't defragment the Master file table, or folders or the pagefile, and
isn't great at compacting free space either.

If you want some fun, have a look at the 30 day trial of diskeeper 8, you
don't get much trial software these days with identical functionality to the
real product.

http://www.execsoft.com/downloads/menu.asp

Its very good and really improves performance, it has an option to
defragment at system boot, which means it can get at the system files, which
are inaccessible to the built in tool when xp is running. It also does a
much better job of contiguising free space.

Paul

The built in defragmenter is a cut down version of executive softwares
diskeeper
 
H

Harry

Paul

Thanks -- I got that spybot terminator -- ran it and found
a whole bunch of things that I was encouraged to kill -- I
killed them and the system seems to be running better...
though I'll let the wife make that decision -- thanks for
your help.

btw: I did all of the other stuff you initially suggested
and everything looked as it should -- the current transfer
mode was Ultra DMA Mode 5.

Harry
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Good stuff !!

You said you had Norton AV,
do you have a firewall?

If not, here's a free one,

www.zonelabs.com

Its just not safe going anywhere near the internet without antivirus and a
firewall these days.

Paul
 
G

Guest

Paul

The defrag took nearly 6 hours -- the 60GB drive was about
60% full. Thanks for the "real" defrag pointer -- I'll
check it out. I think I'm all set for now.

Harry
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Take a look, I've only got 7 days left in the 30 day trial. I really like
it. You can even tell it to sit in the background and let it gone it with
it, when it thinks it should and the system is idle.

I was just wondering if your's took a long time because its a FAT32 file
system.


Paul
 
G

Guest

Hey Paul,

Thanks for posting this message, which helped not only
Harry.
However I have a question. I looked at this thread,
because my PC too is oh so slow with 15.5 GB of used
space (and I only have about 20 pics on my pc but a lot
of excel sheets). How is that possible!!
When I followed the steps described below I did
check "eventvwr.msc" and found a few red circles with
white crosses with all the same message saying:
"THe Eicon Networks USB ADSL Loader service failed to
start due to the following error: The Service cannot be
started, either because it is disabled or because it has
no enabled devices associated with it."
What does that mean and what should I do? Is this the
only reason my pc is slow?

Thanks so much,
Elsenoor
 
P

Paul B T Hodges

Hey Elsenoor,

Cool name ! Rings a bell, but I can't quite place it.

So then, whats this eicon networks service?
Do you have an eicon networks adsl modem external modem, connected to your
pc through a usb port ?

If so do you know what model it is ?
Is it a Diva ?
The latest drivers are available here. Quite an impressive level of detail.
http://www.eicon.com/support/helpweb/dcxpen/install_xp_adsl_usb.asp

If this is not your modem, what are you using (make and model)

Perhaps this is an old bit of software hanging around from a previously used
modem.

In general, performance can problems can be caused by various factors.

When you pc is slow, check in task manager and see whats happening.

ctrl-alt-del

Click the process tab.

In the bottom bar of the window, how many Processes do you see, What is the
cpu usage and the 2 numbers for commit charge.

If cpu usage is high, which processes are using it, look in the cpu column,
click on the CPU heading, and it will sort the processes into cpu usage
order.

Post the names of any processes using more than a few percent.

Find out your hardware info.

control panel/system/general tab

Post what it says under the heading Computer, for the processor type and
speed , and the amount of memory.

Viruses in all their different flavours can be a huge drain on cpu and
memory. Do you have anti virus software installed and use it regularly?

If not, AVG anti virus is free www.grisoft.com
Zone alarm is a free firewall www.zonelabs.com

I use both these and haven't had a problem for several years.

Adware and spyware, which isn't picked up by antivirus software can also
seriously damage your performance. This stuff can be responsible for sending
your personal information to sites on the web, and redirecting you to sites
you didn't choose to go to.

These 2 utilities are also free,

Adaware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/

Spybot http://www.safer-networking.org/

Disk drives with less than 20% free space can also affect performance, so
try and regularly cleanup your system.

Defragmenting you disk regularly can also help performance.

Paul
 
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