Hard Drive questions?

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I have a Dell 4600 (Pent4, 2 gig RAM, Nvidia 6200 Graphics.) I recently reinstalled XP Home on a used WD 40gig hard drive. The computer seems to be running slow and I am thinking the hard drive is the reason. I ran a test program from Western Digital and it "Passed". I was wanting to make a mirror of this hard drive and on the second hard drive which is a newer Seagate 160gb drive with a much bigger buffer. This is not my computer and the person who owns it tends to just want to use it without learning how to maintain it. She loves AOL and this tends to put a lot of junk on the hard drive. So, now that all the programs are installed the way she wants them, having an image for reinstall would be helpful. I just built my first computer with a slower Sempron processor and less RAM and it is flying compared to the Dell. Most of the programs installed are the same. Could the slowness be the difference between and older EIDE drive on the Dell and the refurbished Seagate 80gb Sata drive (set to 1.5 Gb/s)? I am just learning, so any support would be helpful.

For now, she can use the Sempron computer I built. The Dell is needing a new power supply. It is getting pretty noisey and I think they had a lot of problems with the power supply on the 4600.

Lastly, how do you guys deal with those people that become overwhelmed and defensive with anything computer related? When I started helping this lady with her computer she had no firewall, no antivirus program, no spyware installed, and a keylogger that needed to be removed. When I suggested she remove the key logger pronto, she nearly kicked me out
(its my landlord). So, I have learned to tread lightly.
 
Is the drive running FAT-32 or NTFS? Was it partioned and formatted with the Win-XP setup program? I have found these drives to sometimes act slow if they were Partioned and formatted with previous versions of windows or other software prior to install. It's rare but I have seen it.
 
It is NTFS. I used Darik's Boot and Nuke before installing the operating system to remove the XP operating system that was on it.
 
Just because its a sata doesn't mean its faster than an ide. It all boils down to the physical parameters of the drive i.e. rpm, access time, etc. Even 8MB v/s 32MB buffer does not have much impact on the average throughput of the drive.

Try a benchmark program like PCWizard or SiSandra and see really where is the bottleneck. Sometimes one accidental setting in the BIOS or in the operating system could bring the whole system to a crawl.
 
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Lastly, how do you guys deal with those people that become overwhelmed and defensive with anything computer related?


Perhaps you need to frame their situation differently... Do the work and use general terms to explain what you are doing. I have the downfall of explaining exactly what the issue; I need to stick to something like: You have issues with the security of your computer. We need to work thru the issues to get you back running correctly. I'm going to need to do several things.... and so on. Using "We" usually helps, connoting a team effort. When someone crashes in and starts mucking with the "P" of a PC, people can get territorial.


If not...

do the minimum, pack up, leave; identify more appreciate pro-bono candidates.

It may be abrupt but doing $50-$75/hr work (for free) that is occasionally aggravating enough without additional emotional stress.

I work in IT (don't do PC work) and have spent 10s of HOURS fixing people's computers and educating them. When my advice is not heeded it smacks of a professional insult, and consequences of not heeding my advice are no crisis in my mind.

Plenty of appreciative people out there
 
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Well, been here 13 years. My rent is free (with conditions). Basically, I take care of her property. Today is house cleaning day.

You are right about using general terms. If I use any slightly technical language, she just stops listening. Of course, just showing her how to open or close a program can be too technical at times.
smirk2.gif
I am taking care of things with her computer without talking to her. Thus, the back-ups and copies of things in case things go wrong. Also because I am learning as I go.
 
RPM is the first thing you should check. If your current hard drive is 5400, anything will be an improvement regardless of the buffer size or SATA vs. PATA.
 
lol!

you have my sympathy RE" landlord lady for there are zillions of ignorant people out there for virus/trojan writers to feast on (thus the botnet rampage).

In your case, did you detect "slowness" immediatedly after the install (but before you put on your AV and go online and expose your presence to the world)?

Also: granted that you mobo is still ok, how old is your PSU?
(replace the PSU if you want to keep your mobo).

Cheers,

Q.
 
Originally Posted By: MONKEYMAN
Well, been here 13 years. My rent is free (with conditions). Basically, I take care of her property. Today is house cleaning day.

You are right about using general terms. If I use any slightly technical language, she just stops listening. Of course, just showing her how to open or close a program can be too technical at times.
smirk2.gif
I am taking care of things with her computer without talking to her. Thus, the back-ups and copies of things in case things go wrong. Also because I am learning as I go.


how did you get that sweet deal of free rent?

have you installed spyware and antivirus programs and run scans? my mother in law complained of her P 4 HT, 512 ram, 9200 radeon being slow. so they bought a new computer and gave me the old one. they exclusively use AOL too. I got the pc cleaned up, maxed the ram out to 2 GB, XP is running fast now.
 
Cutehumor said:
how did you get that sweet deal of free rent?

Well, it is a little harder then you think. First, you get kicked out of the monastery. Then you make friends with someone who attends services their who needs someone to take care of the house and cats.
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Ok, the drive is 7200 speed. I am running PC Wizard for Global Performance as we speak. Actually, I noticed the problem when installing a new graphics card. It was not recognized (no display on monitor). I shut the computer off pressing the power button, put the old card in, and uninstaller the old Nvidia drivers. After that Windows did not want to load or work well. The mouse would just become a hand were the pointer was and was locking up. I used the Last Known Good Configuration and it worked ok. After using it a while it still was somewhat unresponsive. So maybe I messed something up turning it off when it locked up? I just don't know enough about computers at this point to put this in the proper perspective.

I just find AOL messes with a computer. So, I don't know if it was AOL being a resource hog or something else.

I ordered a new power supply on Ebay. This one is just making too much noise.
 
The WD400 (7200rpm, 2MB buffer) was never a fast drive. Check to make sure it isn't stuck in PIO mode, though. You might consider a more modern $45 80GB drive with 8MB or larger buffer as a replacement if you're sure this is a hardware rather than software issue.
 
The secondqry drive is newer. I tried to use it as the primary drive but the install of AOL did not work well, so I just reformated the original drive and reinstalled Windows a few years ago. So, I think I the second drive has the 8 mg buffer. I have made DVD's of the important stuff and could use this WD drive as the secondary drive instead. The PC Wizard Global Performance looked like a triangle shape. I am not sure how to interpret it. Here are the numbers:

>>

> Processor Global Performance : 738.6626

> Cache Global Performance : 16181

> Memory Global Performance : 3073

> Video Global Performance : 163

> Hard Disk Global Performance : 65

I was going to use a new hard drive for this reinstall of Windows but ordered a Sata Drive by mistake. It gave me an excuse to build a computer with all the extra parts I had around the house.

So, how could I make an image of the WD hardrive and copy it to the larger 160 gb Seagate secondary drive?
 
You can download Seagate's SeaTools to copy the existing system partition to the newer drive. If you'd like to make an image of the pristine install for the next time the user nukes it, G4L will do it all for free.
 
tropic, while that is a good idea, I have seen bad drives that past the sea-tools and other MFG's tests that are in the stage of going bad or have controllers that are failing but good enough to fool the test. Just something to keep in mind.
 
I went to Device Manager/IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Primary IDE Channel has Device 0 Current Transfer Mode: Ultra DMA Mode 5. However, Device 1 Current Transfer Mode: PIO mode.

I Googled a fix with but was not sure what to do. I tried to uninstall the Unistall the drivers with several reboots to no avail. Could this mean the controller is going bad? My secondary drive looks fine.

BTW, how do you know when a hard drive is going bad? If it goes bad I still have an the original 40gb Maxtor I could use.

Thanks for all the info. I am learning a lot.
 
Hard drives that are going bad generally make noises like clicking sounds (but not always), or the computer gets really really slow and the hard drive light seems to stay solid or blink in a pattern like it keep trying to read that spot of the drive over/over again.

What is Device #1? A hard drive or CD-Rom/DVD? If it is a CD/DVD-ROM then PIO is fine.
 
OK, I was a little confused. It must be the CD writer. The Secondary Channel is Ultra DMA Mode 2 for Device 0 and Device 1. That would be the hard drives if I am understanding correctly.

The drive is not noisy. When I noticed the slowness I did here some clicking, but not very loud or fast. The light for the hard drive is flickering every once in a while. The main thing I notice is it takes a long time before I can use the mouse after a reboot.

The mouse pointer became a finger on the desktop at least once tonight and froze for a long time if I clicked too soon? That was the symptom I was having frequently the other day.
 
I went to the Safe Mode and it did respond well. When I restarted the mouse was working fine, not like before. I wonder if something was working in the background? Spyware Doctor has not picked up anything and only had a cookie in my AVG virus vault. Seagate tests said the drive was good. Anyway, going to work on the image to the other drive and see if the other drive responds better.
 
Run a Scandisk with the "Automatically Fix Errors" and when it asks you to schedule it answer yes. Then reboot and see if maybe their are files on the HDD that are corrupted and causing it to slow down.
 
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