Installing external DVD-RW makes computer perform incredibly slowly

Question

Hi, we have a Dell Dimension 2350 (I think that's the model, it's a 2300 series), 2.2 ghZ P4, 512 MB of RAM. I recently added an external Lite-On DVD-RW drive, that is connected into one of the back USB ports. I love the drive, I went with the external rather than the internal because we're probably going to get a new computer pretty soon, that I hope will be equipped with an internal drive, in which case I'll pass this drive along to my wife whose Dell laptop only has a CD/DVD-ROM, no burner. FYI, the computer is also equipped with a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive, both internal, came from Dell that way. The thing is, since installing the external drive, it has slowed down the overall performance of our computer tremendously. It has slowed down Internet surfing worst of all. We are still on a dial-up connection, will be going DSL or cable shortly since those things are now available to us, but with the 'accelerator' from our ISP (EarthLink) we've always gotten respectable dial-up Internet performance. Now it has slowed to an absolute crawl where it takes forever to load a page. I know that this drive was responsible. When we installed it, it started showing up in our system tray as a USB storage device, with the little green icon. I finally had enough and went through the 'safely remove hardware' spiel, which means the drive no longer shows up in My Computer even though it's still hooked up. And since then, the computer performance has picked up to where it was. Although I will toss this out, a while back we purchased one of those Canon three-in-one (scanner, copier, printer) units and hooked it into one of the USB ports as well, and as long as it's on ... and showing up as a USB storage device as well (it has memory card slots, for what that's worth) ... our computer was running slightly slower than it did before, but not as dramatically as when we hooked up this external drive. Can anyone give me any idea of what's going on here? Are there some USB conflicts? My understanding is that all those USB ports are 2.0. Are there any settings that might need to be adjusted (I tossed this out on another non-Dell board and was told I might need to go into Device Manager and make sure things are going to different ports, although the responder didn't really give me good directions at how to do that)? Could this be a RAM issue? Are both of these units such resource eaters to where we're asking the computer to do too much and need a gig of RAM? Thanks in advance for any help!

Predator · Answer

Hi Grghelb,The 2300 and 2350 series do have USB 2.0, you might want to verify USB is enabled in the BIOS, see this link:2350 System SetupAlso it might be a driver issue, consider uninstalling the USB hub from Device Manager and re-boot the system.Best Regards! God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do and the eyesight to tell thedifference. CD/RW Link

grghelb · Answer

OK, a couple of questions. How do you specifically tell when you enter the system setup mode that the BIOS is 2.0 enabled? And when you say delete the USB hub in Device Manager, do you mean the hub that this particular piece of hardware is using? Looking at Device Manager, under USB controllers, I've got four universal host controllers listed (24CD, 24C2, 24C4, 24C7), four USB root hubs and then USB  mass storage device, which I think is the Lite-On drive since I re-enabled the LiteOn drive today and the USB mass storage device now appears in Device Manager when it didn't yesterday when I had the drive disabled.

osprey4 · Answer

Here's a thought. Check the general tab of your drive and make sure indexing is not enabled.

Predator · Answer

Hi Gr,Go ahead and give John`s suggestion a try first, I forgot about the indexing, then post back and we will discuss your previous post in more detail. In the BIOS under Peripheral Configuration Submenu you should see the key strokes needed to move to Options menu, the default setting for the USB controller is Enabled, but at times it is possible that it has reverted to Disabled.Best Regards God, grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do and the eyesight to tell thedifference. CD/RW Link

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