*** Diagnosis **** May 28, 2007
The Seagate SATA disk (200 GB at 1KB = 1000 Bytes) is the real culprit. It passes VCOM Fix-it tests, but does not allow itself to a test by HardDrive Rebuild program. I swapped it with a EIDE 7200 rpm 80 GB Western Digital disk, and everything is back to normal.
I don’t care what others say, I never liked Seagate, even after its marriage with Maxtor or whomever. It’s the disk that can’t rid of the little mousy trapped inside.
Many thanks to those who contributed with their comments.
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This particular PC from HP equipped with AMD Atholan 64 3700+ processor, Speed 2.2 Ghz.
Over about 3 months ago, it became so slow that even the mouse pointer can hardly move, if I click it, it has no effect on the push-buttons. The browser (Firefox 2.0) takes sometimes 10 minutes to start; and some other programs don’t even start, even though I see them running in the Task Manager’s process list.
Here is the list of what I’ve done:
– Defragmented the entire hard disk (186 GB)
– Created 3 NTFS primary partitions (plus 1 FAT32 recovery/restore partition – from misguided HP)
– Re-installed Windows XP Pro SP2 twice.
– Ran seemingly most powerful registry fixer/cleaner and/or disk checking programs.
– Ran 3 different virus scan programs.
– Ran 3 different spyware removal programs
– Ran VCOM’s System Suite 7.1 (formally Fix-it Utility) to check CPU status (OK.) and RAM health (OK.) and some other hardware devices.
– And finally, I installed Windows XP x64 for AMD. There appeared to be some improvement in the speed of things I could perform with the mouse and keyboard, like opening Explorer or starting another program, etc.
But Win XP x64 is a sucker when it comes to device drivers. Even when I download ATI’s specific (made for x64) display driver, XP x64 won’t let me install it! It just won’t! The audio driver (AD97) for built-in sound card works ok, though it has not made to the MS compatible list.
My guess is that the CPU (Atholan processor 3700+) has been reduced in capacity. The reason I am saying this is that the computer eventually performs its tasks (takes 5 times longer). When I checked the CPU temperature, it is around 22 C , whereas my other PC (Pentium4 2.4 Ghz) runs around 51 C; this seems odd to me! I also run a program that plays Internet TV stations. On my Pentium machine it takes about 15-18 % of CPU time/process. In this AMD 3700+, the same TV program takes 85-100 % of available CPU. So then the CPU has a very low capacity.
I couldn’t find a test program that will actually check CPU capacity in bps. And there is no error message or status code, that I could see anywhere.
Any comments will be appreciated.
Thanks all.