Sluggish Computer Issues

  • Thread starter Deleted member 139876
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Deleted member 139876

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Hey, I need some bloody help from the geniuses here at hardocp. I honestly cannot nail this problem down.

Specs
Motherboard: Biostar AM2 TForce 570 SLi
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 3800 2.0Ghz
RAM: OCZ Reaper DDR2 800mhz 2gbx1gb
HDD: Seagate Barracuda SATA 3Gbp/s 7200.10 (I think it's a perpendicular drive)
FDD: Generic Cheap POS.
ODD: NEC DVD-RAM Combo Writer blah blah blah.
PSU: Antec SmartPower 2.0 500 Watt (Modular cables are a pain in the ass)
GPU: Sapphire ATI X850XT 256MB

I currently upgraded the ram, motherboard, and cpu from 939 to AM2. The motherboard manufacturer is the same (Biostar) along with the CPU manufacturer. The only difference is the RAM manufacturer, which on my old parts was pqi and now is OCZ. All of these parts are twice as fast as my old parts (RAM and CPU)

The computer posts fine. I ran memtest for three hours on the ram and it found no errors (I know I should do a longer run) everything seems to be working beautiful except when I come to installing good ol' Windows. I have tried my original XP Pro disk, my contest won Vista Premium, and backups of my pro disk. All of these produce the same following problem: complete and utter sluggish horseshit.

It took my Windows XP disk 9 hours to install of which I KNOW cannot be normal because I use to reinstall Windows XP in a hour to maybe a bit over that, tops.
With that being said, once Windows was installed everything is extremely sluggish and non-responsive, in the task manager CPU time is being gobbled up by programs that aren't really there. I can barely even get into HDDs or partitions.

Now the strange things I will list regarding this problem.

SNAFU: When installing Windows every little step takes an extremely long time. The normally split second "Reading/Processing Information File" takes MINUTES!
SNAFU2: My DVD Drive when in the Setup stage of installing Windows shuffles and copies files over in little spurts and in longer but slightly rarer very long (2 hour+) spurts of files. It got stuck at 30% 40% and 52% for VERY long times.
SNAFU3: When in the GUI portion of the Setup the 39 minutes actually took 5 hours.
SNAFU4: When Windows goes to load it is extremely slow, and the little green bars hang several times and stutter.
SNAFU5: Various other things I have forgotten.

Anyway, the things I hope I have eliminated from the equation are my DVD drive and disks, I have tried three different DVD/CD rom drives and they all produce similar results, I have tested the RAM throughly (well not quite but fuck it) and have tried it in all four slots on my motherboard. All temperatures are normal, voltages are normal, everything is normal. I have it running barebones right now with just the video card, HDD, and one stick of ram in it. It is also not my jumpers they are have been tried on all configurations. RAID is disabled I only have one HDD.

However, I may know what is causing this problem. It could be the HDD going south (which I doubt but I can't test that) or it could be how the motherboard sets devices for what type of transfer function it uses PIO and UDMA. As far as I know the Optical drives which are on the mysterious (ATA) IDE 0 and IDE 1 channels are on PIO Auto (MB settings) and the SATA are on UDMA. I could be completely wrong of course but I'm quite positive. I

Maybe this could all be solved by installing the chipset drivers, not to mention it would probably take hours to complete at the current rate.Also considering how fast and speedy Windows is with a fresh install on the rest of my machines this is proving to be a very, very vexing problem. If anyone has a an idea on how to fix this or has had this happen to them before, I appreciate the help. Thank you for your time guys, and I'm sorry I have to bother you guys with my problems.
 
It couldn't hurt to try a different hard drive, could easily help determine the issue.

Sounds to me though like a bad XP disk or bad CD/DVD drive, though you mentioned you have tried multiple copies and multiple drives?
 
Try running a nix live cd (Ubuntu or Knoppix work well for this task) and see how your machine performs... If all is good, you will know for sure your optical drive and ram are ok, and pretty well verify that your hard drive is the problem...

Good luck....
 
sounds like your install disk is going bad.how this happens i have no idea.my xp disk did the same thing,go to certain portions of installation hang or just not copy.one day it just stopped and was forced to buy one more copy
 
Okay, I tried booting with a Ubuntu Live CD 6.06 and I get this.

0003.jpg


I get two screens like this, one telling me the GUI failed, and then a Server X failing (huh?) it then sends me off to a CLI, and tells me all about their sudo root command system. I'm lost. :D But I assume that this succesfully booted correct? I really have no idea, I have never used Linux before.

Also when I first tried booting with the disk it told me that the IO-APIC was not in sync with the timer, along with the Timer not being connected. This was all fixed by quickly looking on the Ubuntu forums on how to add a command to the kernal before I boot it up.
 
I think you may have a bad image... maybe..

Anyhow, download a Ubuntu 7.04 image and use ImgBurn to burn it... and use the slowest settings, and give that a try. The idea is to get a GUI OS running on your machine and make sure that it works correctly... video, sound, network etc... that will pinpoint your hard drive as the culprit.....
 
I'm a step ahead of you, I'm getting 7.04 to try now, but I very much doubt that the image is bad I used utorrent to get it off of Ubuntu releases page, and ImgBurn verified the disk as did Ubuntu.
 
I'm a step ahead of you, I'm getting 7.04 to try now, but I very much doubt that the image is bad I used utorrent to get it off of Ubuntu releases page, and ImgBurn verified the disk as did Ubuntu.

Your probably right.... is the 6.06 disc you used the "alternate install" variety by any chance..I think that may be what you have there... regardless the fact that it did boot and get you to a CLI interface indicates that things are working the way they should.... I really think you have a dying hard drive....
 
Your probably right.... is the 6.06 disc you used the "alternate install" variety by any chance..I think that may be what you have there... regardless the fact that it did boot and get you to a CLI interface indicates that things are working the way they should.... I really think you have a dying hard drive....

This is the one I used.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/dapper/

The file name that I used on that website is "ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso.torrent"

I'm burning 7.04 to a disk now, and I'll try that, I also just told utorrent to recheck the files, they are 100% verified.
 
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