slow hard drive?

[Japhy]

Hello,
I believe my hard drive is causing a real bottleneck in my system
performance, but not being an expert, and looking for confirmation or
advice. My system is :
Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
528 MB RAM
Maxtor 2F040L0 40GB hard drive.
O/S : XP Home Edition

I regularly run scandisk and defrag.

Whenever my system slows to a crawl, I notice the HD light is on.
Some examples which cause my frustration :
1) It takes a very long time to load large programs (55 seconds to load
Dreamweaver 2004)
2) 20 seconds to exit Word (after saving my document!)
3) Right click on a file to get properties can take 10 seconds.
4) Explorer listing of 380 files takes 15 seconds.

These all seem excessively slow to me. Am I wrong?
I am thinking of investing in a SCSI controller and hard drive.
Any Windows settings that may help?
Thanks in advance!
J

 

[Rod Speed]

I believe my hard drive is causing a real bottleneck in my system
performance, but not being an expert, and looking for confirmation or
advice. My system is :
Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
528 MB RAM
Maxtor 2F040L0 40GB hard drive.
O/S : XP Home Edition

I regularly run scandisk and defrag.

No point in doing that unless your use is quite unusual.

Whenever my system slows to a crawl, I notice the HD light is on.

Because those ops use the drive as fast as it can be used.

Some examples which cause my frustration :
1) It takes a very long time to load large programs
(55 seconds to load Dreamweaver 2004)

Thats unlikely to be due to the hard drive.

2) 20 seconds to exit Word (after saving my document!)

That in spades.

3) Right click on a file to get properties can take 10 seconds.
Ditto.

4) Explorer listing of 380 files takes 15 seconds.
Ditto.

These all seem excessively slow to me. Am I wrong?

Not with the numbered ones, thats slower than it should be.

I am thinking of investing in a SCSI controller and hard drive.

Wont achieve a thing.

A decent modern IDE drive will perform better.

Any Windows settings that may help?

How long since it was installed ?

 

[Kevin Buffardi]

These all seem excessively slow to me. Am I wrong?

I am thinking of investing in a SCSI controller and hard drive.
Any Windows settings that may help?
Thanks in advance!
J

Yes, those are all excessively slow. It could be a number of things.

Few questions:

How much of the hard drive space is available?
Is the hard drive showing any other poor symptoms (clicking, whining, etc)?
Does the same thing occur in safe mode?
How many (and which) processes are running in the background?

Your system's symptoms sound like its a victom of defrag neglect, but it
sounds like you've taking care of those. I believe your HD is 5400 rpm
which is on the slow end of today's drives, but it shouldn't be *that*
slow. I sometimes use a 120 GB 5400 HD on *USB 1* and it isn't nearly
that slow. Your problem shouldn't be that you're using IDE instead of
SCSI, so unless you're sold on getting a SCSI controller, there
shouldn't be a need to get one. If the problem's really with the hard
drive, it would be cheaper to just get a new, faster IDE drive.

Keep us updated on your findings and we'll chip in where we can.

//Kevin

 

[GTS]

Hello,
I believe my hard drive is causing a real bottleneck in my system
performance, but not being an expert, and looking for confirmation or
advice. My system is :
Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
528 MB RAM
Maxtor 2F040L0 40GB hard drive.
O/S : XP Home Edition

I regularly run scandisk and defrag.

Whenever my system slows to a crawl, I notice the HD light is on.
Some examples which cause my frustration :
1) It takes a very long time to load large programs (55 seconds to load
Dreamweaver 2004)
2) 20 seconds to exit Word (after saving my document!)
3) Right click on a file to get properties can take 10 seconds.
4) Explorer listing of 380 files takes 15 seconds.

These all seem excessively slow to me. Am I wrong?
I am thinking of investing in a SCSI controller and hard drive.
Any Windows settings that may help?
Thanks in advance!
J

I recently looked at a nearly new Dell Dimension for a friend, as two weeks
ago it suddenly exhibited all the symptoms you list - in fact it was so slow
to do anything on it that it seemed slower than any PC I could remember
using. The common factor was the hard-drive, it was incredibly slow and
clunky and was accessing something all the time. I first thought spyware or
virus / trojan- but no. Then made sure the indexing service was off - it
was. Then tried making a lot of the services manual as Dell PC's do seem to
have a lots of bloatware running all the time - this PC had 70 odd services
running all the time! The one obvious error found was that the WMI
repository was corrupt - as stated by a pop-up message when you tried to use
MSCONFIG or System Restore (preventing restore from running). Since then I
have discovered a corrupted repository can be repaired, but at the time I
just reinstalled everything - Dell call it a destructive reinstall. Then the
PC was perfect and running normally again. My hunch is that an automatic
update either from MS or Dell caused this, as the PC was fine for the first
4 weeks of it's life, and is again now - all the same progs and hardware
have been reinstalled but so far no return of this weird problem.
Graham

 

[Nick]

Whenever my system slows to a crawl, I notice the HD light is on.
Some examples which cause my frustration :
1) It takes a very long time to load large programs (55 seconds to load
Dreamweaver 2004)
2) 20 seconds to exit Word (after saving my document!)
3) Right click on a file to get properties can take 10 seconds.
4) Explorer listing of 380 files takes 15 seconds.

I have the same symptoms at work with computers using Norton
AntiVirus. The faster the processor is, the slower the computer is
using Norton.

Nick