Computer Slowed to a crawl...

[goldboyd]

Ok this is pretty wierd, i know what i'm doing inside computers, and can fix 99% of things, but this i got no idea on. The computer is either a 200 or 233 (not sure, its not mine) pentium, 64 megs ram... Recently its just slowed to a friggin crawl. It feels like a 486 with 8 megs of ram. I've reformatted, tried win95 and 98. Tried the hard drive in a different machine, so its not that. Anybody have any ideas? Is it possible for a mb or cpu, to just really slow way down.

I'd appreciate any help as this is really pissing me off.

Thanks a lot in advance.

[WhoKnowsWho]

When the POST comes up... when it first starts and it finds the IDE devices... what does it report the CPU as being? Maybe a jumper got knocked lose and it does think it is a 486 or something. Also, check the settings for the hard drive in the bios, if the pio mode is turned down all the way for some reason, the hard drive would be extremely slow...

[Plaster]

Another thing to look at is the L1 and L2 cache settings in the BIOS. IF these are disabled, then it will crush system performance.

[hai]

Besides checking L1,L2 cache and ram delay time, run wintop to figure out if some processes are eating cpu power, run any benchmark program to make sure which part is slowwing down. well, in old computers, there's a turbo option to switch cpu speed between high and low, check it as well.

[This message has been edited by hai (edited 06-10-99).]

[a Bill]

If the HDD is fragmented badly or almost full, it'll slow the computer to a crawl.

[carran]

Also, some virus scanning software, if it's set to scan files as programs are run (McAfee's System Scan for example), will slow a system down, particularly if it's set to scan all files.

[AndreBranco]

hello everyone
i also have a problem with my system
i got a new tiger celeron 400 with a wd (western digital) ac26400 hd--in the first 2 days the system was going really fast then the harddrive started to make strange noices and started to run a little slower i dont why. i ran norton antivirus 5 and found no virus. does anyone else had this kind of problem with hd and was able to fix it?

[DavidX]

goldboyd
Yet another thing to check is if the PC is running in "MS-DOS compatibility mode". That could be caused by a line inserted in your config.sys by a recently installed program. Check under the Performance tab in System Properties.

AndreBranco
Sounds like a bad hard drive. Return it.

[Zonker]

seach for the text "noide" in Regedit, and remove it when you find it. This is what Windows does when you install a new hard drive (sometimes) and disables the busmaster driver for the Atapi device.

Microsofts article about this
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q151/9/11.asp