[colecampbell666]

As of late I've been having PC speed problems. While my PC was slow to begin with, I've recently been having massive speed problems.

Specs:

P4 1.5 Ghz, 256 KB Cache, 400 Mhz FSB
2 GB PC133 SDRAM
ATi Radeon 9550 PRO, 256 MB, 200 Mhz RAM, 250 Mhz Core
Some Maxtor HDD Supposed to be 160 GB, reads as 32. 7200 RPM
Generic PSU (Sparkle, I think), never had problems before.
Onboard Creative sound (5800 something, from 2001)
Gigabyte 8IDML mobo
Windows XP SP3

Anyways, I get stuttering every few seconds in most games I play, even FlashPlayer applications have this problem. It seems weird because it has never happened before with these games with this severity. I get stuttering in AoEII, which I used to be able to play fine before. I get much worse performance in EEII, HW2 stutters when there are more than a few ships, FlashPlayer stutters on YouTUbe videos, when my sister plays WebKinz... The list goes on.

The only thing I've changed in the last few months is upgrading to 2 GB of RAM, reinstalling Windows, and upgrading to SP3.

I have the latest Catalyst/chipset/whatever drivers, nothing running on startup besides AV, no unnecessary programs, no Spyware/viruses.

[Mars]

May seem obvious but:

Clean out CPU heatsink, make sure you have good airflow
Check hard-drive (use HD tune or some such thing)
Defrag, virus scan, etc.
Ensure your memory is firmly locked in place, and that the timings are correct
Try another PSU

I think if Windows SP3 was going to cause problems it would have right away, but I could be wrong

[colecampbell666]

Done.
Not done.
Done.
Not done, but I'm certain it's in place, I put it in myself.
Not an option, and these symptoms are not typical of PSU problems.

[BloodEagle]

10:1 it's SP3. There's a reason why it's not a good idea to install a service pack without formatting the disk.

---

As for the 32GB.... It sounds like you formatted the disk as FAT, instead of NTSF.

[colecampbell666]

10:1 it's SP3. There's a reason why it's not a good idea to install a service pack without formatting the disk.

Like I said, I installed it clean, and then upgraded to SP3.

As for the 32GB.... It sounds like you formatted the disk as FAT, instead of NTSF.

I. Have tried. Everything. With that hard disk. No, it is not FAT formatted. No, it does not have a limiting jumper. No, it's not the motherboard BIOS. Linux will sometimes see the drive (there's a specific sequence of formatting/partitioning to go through to get it to recognize the full drive, and when Linux sees the whole drive, Windows doesn't see it at all)


That doesn't really bother me as I have my 250 GB external, what bothers me is the speed issues.

[Ghostavo]

This will probably sound stupid but, empty your recycle bin.

[colecampbell666]

Yes, because that fixes hard drive errors.

I'm doing an error scan with HD Tune Pro, but I don't know if it will find anything, or be able to fix it for that matter.

'Parently 58^o is a critical HDD temperature.

[Ghostavo]

I thought it was your partition being somewhat full and the OS having a hard time creating temporary files. Hence the empty your recycle bin.

[Admiral_Stones]

Get a Mac?

[colecampbell666]

...Or get a new PC.

I seem to have fixed the problem, I had to use MaxBlast (the OEM tool thingy for the drive) and set the size in the firmware or something.

Now for the speed problem, I can't figure out what it could be.

[blackhole]

If you have a speed problem, whatever it may be, 99% of the time it can be fixed by reformatting and reinstalling windows.

[colecampbell666]

Well Windows is fairly new (read: months old) and I don't do stupid **** with it.

[blackhole]

To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Just worked on a laptop with the same sort of issue.  Tried running about 4 different tools on HD and they either wouldn't work or said there might be a problem.  Finally in a desperate attempt I tossed in a gateway tools CD and it found a problem with the drive and said it fixed it.  Well I did fix it.  Bought a new drive and it's working fine now. 

[Colonol Dekker]

So Cole. . . .
Emptying the bin fixed it yet?

You tried googling the symptoms? (If any aside from general slowness) how many processes showing on task manager and how much cpu are they eating up?

[Admiral_Stones]

To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.

Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.

[blackhole]

To be perfectly blunt, if we didn't do stupid **** to windows, it would last forever. And it doesn't.

Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.

Yes, it does, which is why its so easy to do stupid **** to it

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I've only had to reload any of my systems twice so far and both times was due to hardware.  One bad hard drive, one lightning hit resulting in an infinite loop reboot that corrupted the registry before I could fix the hardware.  This of course doesn't count my series of test machines over the years which were reloaded on a regular basis since they were for testing. 

[colecampbell666]

how many processes showing on task manager and how much cpu are they eating up?

None. I have no problems with background processes.

Meh. Windows suffers from extreme amounts of self-produced entropy, and thus cannot last forever. Hardly for a few months, as we see here.

Not really, Windows is very stable (although not as stable as some other OSes) despite the  outcry against it.

[Stealth]

i'm sure you've tried this, but start --> run --> "msconfig", go to startup and services tab, and disable everything except for the bare necessities, the essentials.  then restart after restart, enable them one at a time, and see what it is.

or enable everything but, say, antivirus.