Slow and unresponsive system under Windows XP Pro

Question

My Dimension E520 didn't come with a floppy, and I couldn't find the right drivers anyway, so I installed Windows XP without RAID. There is only the 1 disk - the original 250GB SATA. It installed OK, and I was able to install all the drivers on Dell's website. The problem is, it runs like a three-legged dog with rabies.   I wiped the original Vista installation because it was slower than my old Athlon 3200, but even under XP the system is slow. It seems to be HD related - HD activity causes 1 of the cores utilization to soar and makes the system unresponsive for minutes at a time sometimes.   Someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong - surely a new core 2 duo system with 2 GB of DDR2 RAM should run faster than an old Athlon. If not, what did I spend all that money for?   Another, possibly related problem is that there is an 'Unknown Device'. The only bit of info XP will give me about it is 'AWY0001' if that means anything to anyone.

mombodog · Answer

Clean install windows again and then follow this order when installing drivers   http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?c=us&docid=1A0C0937D62A8739E0401E0A55174744&journalid= 4F1F82483DC811DBAE564F9328EE04A4&l=en&s=gen

mombodog · Answer

How are you resetting your DMA mode?

xoc · Answer

Hi Mombodog,

Thank you for helping! :-)

I thought I did install in that order, and I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling all the device drivers once the OS was loaded, but I'll give it another go and report back.

I am 99% sure it is a DMA issue of some sort, but resetting the DMA status doesn't help. I get faster data transfers with my USB Flash Stick! hdtune says the transfer rate is under 4Mb/sec. I'm starting to think that maybe I got a dud HD, but it isn't showing any errors with a hdtune quick error check.

OK, off do do the install (again)!

xoc · Answer

The re-install didn't work. I was particularly careful - rebooting after each driver. The Dell instructions don't mention when to install the storage drivers, so I tested it without installing the special drivers. Still painfully slow. Then I tried installing the Intel Storage driver and application, as supplied when I enter my service tag. The driver part installed without complaint, but the application spat out an error that my machine didn't 'meet minimum specifications'. It definitely has the Intel ICH8 chipset.

Aaaargggh. This is so frustrating.

xoc · Answer

I'm resetting my DMA by going into the device manager, selecting the IDE ATAPI/ATA controller, setting it to PIO mode, rebooting, then setting it to DMA and reboooting again. The machine must have been power-cycled 100 times in the few days I'd had it.

I also tried using the regedit method, but it didn't work either.

One weird thing I noticed: the device manager lists two 'Primary ATA/ATAPI controllers' and one 'Secondary ATA/ATAPI'. No mention of SATA anywhere, unlike my old Athlon64 system.

Its starting to look like this must be some kind of weird hardware fault to me.

mombodog · Answer

From Microsoft     To re-enable the typical, or faster, transfer mode for an affected device: 1. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then click Computer Management. 2. Click System Tools, and then click Device Manager. 3. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers node. 4. Double-click the controller for which you want to restore the typical DMA transfer mode. 5. Click the Driver tab. 6. Click Uninstall. 7. When the process completes, restart your computer. When Windows restarts, the hard disk controller is re-enumerated and the transfer mode is reset to the default value for each device that is connected to the controller.     Found in this article  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

xoc · Answer

I found (tried) that method in my travels too. I think it is a driver problem. The drive works fine in RAID mode, with Dell Vista slipstream install disk, but standard XP doesn't have the RAID drivers, and the system doesn't come with a floppy drive, so there's no way to install the right drivers, even if I could find them. Aaargh. I spoke to Dell support. They think its a faulty HD, but I think its faulty drivers.

xoc · Answer

Dell sent me out a new disk. That fixed it - strange type of failure.

Storage, Drives & Media

Slow and unresponsive system under Windows XP Pro

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