priming issues

[ziddey]

Well, recently, my computer has been unresponsive as hell with even the lightest of loads. The hdd would chug and chug for no good reason. This has been with the past three motherboards I've tried, so I don't know what's up. I just got a p4 2.6c and it has the same issue. Most specifically, priming never made the computer as unresponsive as it does now. The hdd goes solid and even the cursor jitters. And that's not even loading both cpu's, which I'm having trouble doing.

I got two instances, and set the respective affinities, but look at these screenies:

http://www2.ijib.com:1337/~ziddey/temp/logical.JPG
that's the one with only priming done on the logical. load on the logical goes to 100% as expected


but if i run two at once, with one on the physical, and one on the logical:
http://www2.ijib.com:1337/~ziddey/temp/both.jpg

it refuses to full load either, and my computer is unusably sluggish.

I am running w2k3, and have been for the longest time, so I would at least like to think that I know what I'm doing... But the issue seems to revolve around hdd activity and paging. Is there something I'm missing with these newer intel chipsets? In the past, with my 845pe and win2k3, I'd have to use the w2k3 default drivers for my ide. And I'm only using standard ide (not sata) so I'm again using the default drivers with this ich5r southbridge

But my hdd activity always always always goes off the charts and my system is a bear.

Could it be that my page file is on its own partition on the end of the harddrive and not the c drive?

Thanks!