XP painfully slooooow

**buksida** · April 29th, 2004, 12:22 AM

Had a customer bring an XP box in (spec below) complaining about crashes, errors, slow running and the usual windows problems. Advised him to put it in a bigger case with more fans to assist cooling as the one he had was barely big enough to house a small family of gerbils.

He goes for the bigger case (and PSU) and a new HDD (for his music). I do the re-build and format the disk to install XP pro. The installation took over 6 hours (i had to leave it running overnight and resume in the morning), to start the thing up takes a good 15 minutes

AMD XP2000
Generic VIA mobo (not sure on brand as it was one of those all-in deals with the whole world on-board)
256 DDR 266
Geforce 4 64Mb 440 (disabled on-board VGA)
Seagate 80Gb 7200
48x CD-RW

So the case, HDD, and PSU are new. I've tried different RAM, a different CPU, clearing BIOS, different IDE cables. Now I'm truly stumped ?!?!?! Dodgy mobo?

**ilovetheusers** · April 29th, 2004, 12:05 PM

Are you doing the install to the new HDD and have elimiated his old from the picture?? Is the BIOS seeing the HDD correctly and are the jumpers set properly (just a guess)?

**natcom** · April 29th, 2004, 01:46 PM

update the bios i had a problem like yours by doing that it fix it

**buksida** · April 29th, 2004, 09:21 PM

Its not the HDD as i've tried two different ones and its the same.

Will try the BIOS update but its difficult to tell what mobo it is as its a generic all in deal from a local supplier here.

Tried installing win2000 yesterday .... 7 hours later and its still going ...

**TripleRLtd** · April 29th, 2004, 10:11 PM

Could it be that the new drive is DOA? Run a check with the makers diags? If it turns out alright, you've eliminated all other possibilities, right? MB it is then, as long as the "new" parts you tried were all good. Bummer, though. You may as well have sold him a new PC. BTW, go to www.wimsbios.com for mb maker from the ID at the bottom of the boot screen.

**buksida** · April 29th, 2004, 11:59 PM

Thx for the replies, I did fail to mention that the sloooooow boot was happening on his old Maxtor disk also. Will check out that mobo BIOS site.

**davepoet** · April 30th, 2004, 01:02 AM

sounds to me like it is the mobo. Try slapping the chip, Video & IDE cables onton another board and see. My guess it that the board has had it...

you can always tell him that it is because of the small case that the ambient temp inside the case remained at a consistently high enough level to do long term, irrepubale damage to the board.

**buksida** · April 30th, 2004, 06:43 AM

well cheers for all the feedback, managed to determine the mobo was an MSI-6390 from that site TripleRLtd posted. downloaded the latest BIOS - W6390VMS.260,
flashed it without a hitch and rebooted ...........

now is when the expletives start to fly ! just as slow (possibly even slower) to boot into windows (at least 15 minutes). so i guess i can bin that mobo and tell him to get a decent one like ASUS or something.

chip and agp worked fine on another board.

**kpataska** · April 30th, 2004, 08:55 AM

Originally Posted by buksida

Had a customer bring an XP box in (spec below) complaining about crashes, errors, slow running and the usual windows problems. Advised him to put it in a bigger case with more fans to assist cooling as the one he had was barely big enough to house a small family of gerbils.

He goes for the bigger case (and PSU) and a new HDD (for his music). I do the re-build and format the disk to install XP pro. The installation took over 6 hours (i had to leave it running overnight and resume in the morning), to start the thing up takes a good 15 minutes

AMD XP2000
Generic VIA mobo (not sure on brand as it was one of those all-in deals with the whole world on-board)
256 DDR 266
Geforce 4 64Mb 440 (disabled on-board VGA)
Seagate 80Gb 7200
48x CD-RW

So the case, HDD, and PSU are new. I've tried different RAM, a different CPU, clearing BIOS, different IDE cables. Now I'm truly stumped ?!?!?! Dodgy mobo?

Are there two hard drives in the system? On the same chain? Could it be that one drive is a different ATA speed than the other, causing them to both step down in speed?

Have you tried the drive manufacturer's software to make sure that the ATA speed and all bells & whistles are turned on?

Kind of a headscratcher, eh?

Hope this helps!

Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s

**FireAm94** · April 30th, 2004, 09:31 AM

Other swear by Microstar but IMO they're junk. We had so many mainboard failures (mostly 6340, the KT3 Ultras couldn't even correctly detect memory speeds causing POST problems) that we stopped carrying them. I agree that the mainboard needs to be checked out.

Joe

**NooNoo** · April 30th, 2004, 01:20 PM

Sounds like someone has udma turned off in bios for the ide controllers. The win2k install, was it booted from cdrom?

What ide cable type did you use? Did you change the cables?

**FireAm94** · April 30th, 2004, 01:37 PM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

Sounds like someone has udma turned off in bios for the ide controllers. The win2k install, was it booted from cdrom?

What ide cable type did you use? Did you change the cables?

You aren't looking at 15 minutes to boot with 16Mb transfer rate even. 15 minute boot time = something bad wrong...not just udma setting.

Joe

**buksida** · May 1st, 2004, 02:50 AM

Only one drive in there - the new one and its fine

bios settings for ide are fine - tried different ide cables (66)

w2k and XP were installed from CD - they both took half a day

**format c:** · May 1st, 2004, 03:32 AM

Toss the board, Sell him a nice Asus p4c800, I had the MSI Neo 2 and had stablity problems, the same goes for MSI Video cards
I have the p4c800 deluxe and an Asus video card, good solid parts

**confus-ed** · May 1st, 2004, 04:04 AM

Well the install taking so long says its something very fundamental, did we ever try a bios flash ? Oh reading back you did !

If it still does it after any available updates & with minimum kit installed then its maybe just not xp compatible, they put 'designed for xp' on the boxes for a reason you know, not every bios is capable of supporting xp/w2k - it works 'different' than it does in 9x which is less 'picky' ..

Start chucking in 'extra' stuff on top (like our AGP card instead of its onboard) then the 'designed for xp' if present for the board, maybe isn't anymore either !