Slow Hard Drive?

[Jeff]

My daughter has a Dell Inspiron laptop she uses at college. It runs XP
Home, SP-1 and has a Pentium III at 1GB, and 512 MB RAM.

Her HD seems to be rather slow. It's been defragmented using Raxco's
PerfectDisk. Is there any BIOS or XP setting or something else I can do to
make the HD faster?

Thanks.

 

[R. McCarty]

Check the Primary IDE controller in Device Manager and see what
operating mode the drive is working in. Usually, it will be an Ultra
DMA mode 3-4. XP has a "Feature" where if a certain error count
on an IDE device happens, XP will step back it's operating mode to
a slower value or type (PIO).
Sometimes an Intel Chipset driver is necessary to get the correct
drivers in place.
To get an overall rating on the notebook - Visit PC Pitstop and run
their on-line test. It can reveal areas of a PC that aren't working up
to what comparable systems are rated.
http://pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp
You can test it anonymously, if you don't want to sign up for an
account to save your test scores/details.

 

[Alphonse]

Before you do that, try cleaning the Internet Explorer cache... right-click
on the IE icon on the desktop and click Properties, or in the Control Panel,
Internet Options, or within IE, Tools, Internet Options. Click Delete Files,
check Delete all offline contents. Once the hour glass changes back to an
arrow--this can take a few minutes--click on the Advanced tab, scroll almost
all the way down and find Empty Temporary Internet...

Also, click the Start button, Run and type %temp% on the field and click OK.
This should open a Windows Explorer window at the Temp folder; proceed to
delete everything that is there. Be aware that some tmp files might be in
use so Windows will not allow their deletion; simply skip them and delete
the rest.

Reboot and try the defrag again. Please let us know your results.
Cheers

 

[Jeff]

Thank you. I will do that when I get hold of her laptop again, probably
next week.

Appreciate it.

 

[Jeff]

Thank you very much.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP\)]

If this is happening when she's running the laptop off of the batter, make
sure there isn't a power management setting that is the source of the issue.
Right click a blank space on the desktop, select properties, go to the
Screen Saver tab, click the power button under Monitor Power, check the
options to see if the system is user some power saver selection meant to
conserve battery power when not connected to AC.

 

[Jeff]

Thank you. Will do.

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP\)]

You're welcome.

 

[Alex Nichol]

My daughter has a Dell Inspiron laptop she uses at college. It runs XP
Home, SP-1 and has a Pentium III at 1GB, and 512 MB RAM.

Her HD seems to be rather slow. It's been defragmented using Raxco's
PerfectDisk. Is there any BIOS or XP setting or something else I can do to
make the HD faster?

Only check I can suggest is at Control Panel - System - Hardware -
Device Manager. Look in 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers' for the Primary
channel, double click and on the Advanced page make sure it is on
Transfer Mode - ' DMA if available'; and that Current mode is some
level UDMA, not PIO. If it has got on PIO it indicates there has been
some, possibly temporary, hardware glitch and it has dropped back to
this mode for safety. If so, you can highlight the Master controller,
just above, Action - Remove, and OK, close, power off, and reboot for
Plug and Play to have another go.

 

[Jeff]

Thank you. I will work on it when I get my hands on her laptop next.

I appreciate it.

 

[Microsoft]

Dell Inspirion has a problem... by default.

It has to do with Hitachi Hard Disks and you need a
Hard Drive Firmware Update

Dell knows about this and has released an update for this.

-s-

Thank you. I will work on it when I get my hands on her laptop next.

I appreciate it.

 

[Jeff]

Thank you.

--

Jeff Williams
Email address deliberately false to avoid spam
(e-mail address removed)

Dell Inspirion has a problem... by default.

It has to do with Hitachi Hard Disks and you need a
Hard Drive Firmware Update

Dell knows about this and has released an update for this.

-s-