Crap, slow hard drive nonsense

[Chadruharazzeb]

We was having a LAN "party" this weekend and I was disgusted, furious and embarrassed in equal measure that my PC was the last to join a game by up to a minute cos it took too friggin long to load levels.

I only bought the HD about a month ago as I thought my old one was too slow, this doesn't seem to be any better. It's a 7200rpm, the same as most of the other folk at the gig.

Latest IDE/ board drivers installed, DMA is on.

EDIT, added a bit of clarification

[Tom Salter]

What's the rest of your system spec? Especially your motherboard make/model.

[Chadruharazzeb]

Athlon XP 2000 on a VIA K7VT2 board. Could just be a really **** mobo I suppose, it was cheap...

[charlesr]

Has it got 8mb cache? Or just 2? That would make a fair difference.

[Chadruharazzeb]

It's 8. At least that's what the receipt says

[csuzw]

How much memory on your graphics card? that could make a major difference on loading times.

[demon9k]

How full is your hard drive, how many crappy little programs have you got installed on it and how many background processes have you got running?

My PC went so fast when I first set it up but now its going so slow because its full of crap and its about time for a format.

[Ravon]

I have virtualy the same HDD as chad and it was going at full speed... the only problem i have is i was getting weird network performance issues that seem to be related to my onbourd sound card.. WTF...

[Super Stu]

Onboard soundcard caining the cpu (no hardware accel) no doubt.

How much ram do you have? What game were you playing? Perhaps your swap file is fragmented to ****e, as well as the game itself.

Million and one reasons why hdd performance could be lower than it should. I don't personally think 2/8meg cache would make any difference, unless the rest of your mates were all on Raptors or something.

[Ravon]

Think my issues are something to do with drivers, and not the cpu.. just read some stuff that seems like others have the same kinda issue...

The Nforce drives seem to be forcing the realtech soundcard to use the wrong driver set .. just have to install a new set of drivers.... doh. thing that is weird is its fine when using optical out .. and only becomes apparent when using headphones/speakers directly inputted in to the sound out..

[Chadruharazzeb]

There's not too much ****e on the HD tbh, like I say it's brand new, not particularly badly fragmented, and there's about 50Gb free on it still.

Got 256Mb graphics card, and 512 system memory. AFAIK both the board and the HD are ATA133. Unless the cheap POS mobo just has a really crap HD controller. Maybe the IDE cable is shoddy?

Ravon's problem was appalling. Improbably, both his graphics and sound drivers/ hardware conspired to cripple his network connection speed.

[Ravon]

I have told you before... its just because you dont know the 1st thing about installing a pc

[Chadruharazzeb]

At least I got to play something. Hah!

[Super Stu]

80 wire ide cable, aye?

edit - although while I think about it, you wouldn't believe the difference in load time on Starwars Galaxies between a machine with 512meg and the same one with 1gig.

[yashiro]

You checked it's running in ATA mode in Windows and not PIO?
All optical drives and some HD's get defaulted to this on some installs.

Also, make sure you're not using an ATA33 cable.