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disk optimizer for XP?

revenant

revenant

[H]F Squad Captain
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Joined
Apr 10, 2005
Messages
17,157
What do you all recomment as a good disk defrag and optimization tool for WinXP? Are the registry tweaks I can access to optimize things like read-ahead caching and things to maximize program loading time? The reason I ask is that I recently loaded up the Nvidia 76.50 forceware drivers and somehow now my machine has horribly slow load times for my games now... I reverted back to 71.89, defragged, and still seems slow.. wondering what tweaks I can use in Windows to try and get some good performance back... It's pretty strange... my load times are like when I only had 512mb of system memory... slllloooowwww... argh! My RAID1 set used to shred on load times... kinda bummed here. *sigh*
 
Well - I think some of my problem might be that I have a RAID1 disk system for my one and only storage on this machine, so the page file (swap) is on it and writes on a RAID1 volume ar e a little bit slower than normal... none the less, my machine's load times were smoking fast only a week ago and something had changed the file systrem or something, it's like my machine only has 512mb of memory again and it's swapping like crazy... I loaded up the 76.50 forceware drivers and they were great for a while, then I noticed the disks would just churn and churn sounding like they were doing full platter sweeps over and over while loading up games... they had never sounded like that before. It's like the disks got completely fragmented, but they weren't. WIndows also started lagging when I shut it down... it sits for a good 15 seconds now on the shutting down screen, when before it would shutdown lickedy split.

I need a good hard bench test util. One that you can compare your machine to others of a similar class... this might help sooth my nuerotic fanaticism. lol I am seriously considering formatting and starting over, because this is only my gaming rig... and just going raid0 on the NVraid controller, vs the Silicon Image controller I am on now. ...and _really_ hoping I don't have a disk failure...
 
HAve you run Adaware /Spybot/Virus scanner? That coul d eb your issue there, are you partitioning your drives? running out of space on one of the partition smaybe?
 
No, I ran them to check and make sure the disks were clean... I run my system lean and mean... only have running what I need for gaming... I am using 26gigs of a 279gig volume. :) I think this URL what I have been looking for:

http://www.ata-atapi.com/sata.htm

I think this could very well be my problem. especially because I am running SATA raid... the data from both drives needs to be the same, else the controller sends for a re-fetch of the data... I have an LCD monitor very near my machine now... ..and... I just upgraded it to a 19" one right around the time this all started. Very suspicious. I think it's throwing off some bad juju and messing up my sata data lines... maybe.. I am going to try differnent cables tonight... I am still open for any suggestions anyone has to offer, though... please let me know your thoughts. :)
 
I think it's sort of like "packet loss" with TCP transmissions. I hope this is it, because I do not want to re-install windows again... *sigh*
 
You can get hold of sheilded cables, that might be an issue i suppose. Turn on SMART in your bios and get a decent monitoring program, see if your drives are throwing any errors, one of them might just have gone wappy.

You have defragged havent you? Seems like an obvious solution but quite a lot of people think that ntfs doesnt need it, it does.
 
yeah - I did all that.. I also defragged with many different methods of data reorganization also and defragged the page file, etc... sequential reads were SOOOO bad still... so I just formatted and started over today.... went RAID0 this time and am just going to backup to an external 300gig drive.. this is only my gaming rig also, so I still have a reliable backup which I use for work and email, etc... anyways, I think SI's RAID1 implementation may be partially at fault here... forcing the drives to over-fetch data... or the drives got slightly out of sync with each other, just enough for it to work, and not enough for any alarms to go off, which again is bad on SI's part, for not having a raid util which checks the health of the mirror set... at any rate, this RAID0 is really fast... liking it so far. Thanks for your suggestions. :)
 
I think I know what happened to my RAID1 set... the disks got out of sync... just enough so it still worked, but very slowly... Silicon Image should have a utility which checks for that kind of stuff... their utility is pretty limited and actually really not very helpful... oh well... raid0 is kickin' booty. :)
 
Executive Software's Diskeeper is one of the best defrag tools I have found. There are some registry settings (I have used them) but the impact in and of themselves is minimal.
 
I was thinking about getting that one. Looks very good. Also the one from O O software looked ok. Thanks for the suggestion
 
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