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| Thread ID: 36920 | 2003-08-23 10:27:00 | Celeron slowdown, even in DOS! | Billy T (70) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 169921 | 2003-08-23 10:27:00 | Hi Team I have spent the day updating my childrens' Win2K computers to IE6 Sp1 and Sp3 for Win in preparation for uninstalling NAV2001 and installing Systemworks including NAV 2003. Both computers are virtually identical, with PC133 M758 motherboards, 256MB RAM & 700MHz cpus, one a PIII733 and the other a Celeron 700. At the same time I have been doing the same to my W2K box which is a PIII550 with Intel MB and 512MB RAM. The Celeron is running very slowly indeed, even when ghosting an image in DOS, taking over 40 minutes to created a compressed image of around 900MB. The other two took about 15 minutes to finish an image. It was slow when installing IE6, though that was not so bad, but it was painfully slow running sfc /scannow in preparation for installing SP3, taking over an hour to complete this task. The C: drive partition is 5GB with less than 2GB used and scandisk took 10 minutes to complete. Defrag is underway as I type but the delay in getting the display on screen reminded me of a 386/25 with 4MB Ram running Win 98! As usual I am making images of the HDDs as I go, with the Primary HDD holding C: & E:, and the Secondary HDD holding D: and F:. This computer threw me at first by changing the D: drive to E: in DOS but leaving it as D: in Windows, and this suggests that there is something odd happening at disk level. Anything run in DOS is usually lightning fast and I can make mistakes faster in DOS than I ever can in Windows! Any ideas on what I can look for? It looks like something pretty fundamental to bugger up DOS. I tried to run it in Safe Mode but that won't boot, completing the "Starting Windows" progress bar across the bottom of the screen but nothing further happens. I have several images going back to well before these problems started, but the slow response in DOS kinda tells me that trying one of thse would be a waste of time in more ways than one. Any ideas would be welcomed. There is something rattling around in the back of my head about disk operating modes but I'm having a loganamnosistic evening and can't think what it is. Cheers Billy 8-{) :( |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 169922 | 2003-08-23 10:45:00 | Pop into the Bios a do an auto detect on the hard drive. Also see if there is a setting that alters the mobo/processing speed. | mark.p (383) | ||
| 169923 | 2003-08-23 13:06:00 | Not got the same batch of ram as the last one, has it? Cheers Murray P |
Murray P (44) | ||
| 169924 | 2003-08-23 13:48:00 | While you have heaps of info in your post I really have no idea where to start. I do wonder why you are not updating Win2000 to SP4 instead of SP3. I would also look at the hard drive on the Celeron. Methinks you just may have too many bad clusters. Just my 2 cents worth but that is where I'd start. |
Elephant (599) | ||
| 169925 | 2003-08-24 01:12:00 | Morning all :D After a Sunday morning lay-in, I am about to do battle again. To update the state of the play, scandisk gives a clean bill of health and I defragged for good measure, however I doubt that the cause is anything so simple. SiSoft Sandra also gives no indication of any problem with the drive. Other info: HDD is Quantum LCT20 ATA100, Format is FAT32, cluster size 4kB. MB only supports speed up to DMA66 but that is a no change situation. Looking in BIOS was more fruitful, with the drive settings all set to Auto on the fast twin machine, but on the slow machine they are set: Primary Master User (+ setting details) Primary Slave User (+ setting details) Secondary Master Not installed Secondary Slave CD Rom The two User settings and the CD rom are PIO Mode 4 I am outside of my experience window here, but I assume that setting the settings on the slow machine to User will not cause me any problems? Just out of interest, it takes 30 second from switch-on to get to the "starting windows" message vs 20 seconds for the other, 1m20 to get to the initial desktop colour screen vs 48 seconds, 2m10 to get to logon vs 1m45 and 3m10 to get to the "ready to rumble" desktop vs 2m35 I won't play with the bios settings until I get some reassurance from PF1 but in the meantime I'm going to device manager to see what they say about drive setting there. It is very helpful having two very similar computers to play with! Cheers Billy 8-{) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 169926 | 2003-08-24 01:17:00 | > I do wonder why you are not updating Win2000 to SP4 > instead of SP3. Sorry Elephant, forgot to respond to this. I am not updating to SP4 because it is a major download and doesn't have anything critical that would help me right now. I will wait for the PCW CD version. To be honest, I only loaded SP3 because the worm fix wouldn't work unless I did. :8} Cheers Billy 8-{) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 169927 | 2003-08-24 01:45:00 | While not informed as well as I could/should be, I would be inclined to change your second HD to secondary master and put both on auto. While I'd probably do that to my own machine. I'd wait a bit and see what other(better informed) posters have to say before taking my advice. | Rod ger (316) | ||
| 169928 | 2003-08-24 02:02:00 | Set to auto, or try set the drives to dma mode(or at least primary disk). pio takes alot more processor time hence the slow down. | rsnic (3780) | ||
| 169929 | 2003-08-24 02:14:00 | Thanks Chris Funny thing though, Device Manager says that DMA mode is being used, but BIOS says PIO. I'll change to Auto and see what happens. Cheers Billy 8-{) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 169930 | 2003-08-24 12:19:00 | What happened Billy? | Rod ger (316) | ||
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