last week my desktop (about 5 years old) suddenly slowed down, its so slow i can’t even run the windows scan disc function (minutes on my laptop, turned it off after 6 hours yesterday and still only at the beginning of stage 4).

i’ve stripped out some recent software and also run spybot, adaware and avg and found nothing.

i ran a smart scan with speedfan and got a 94% healthy report. some issues with hd overcycling or something.

can anyone advise me if there is anything else i can try, and whether there is anything non hd that could be causing this problem. i’m quite happy to replace the HD as from what i can see it’ll only cost about 25quid, but don’t want to if its not necessary.

the only other thing i’m wondering is could it be down to the cold? from new the machine would not launch windows if it was a cold morning in the winter, and it is incredibly cold here this year (plus its in coldest room of our cold house).

Sounds like you’ve managed to fill up your hdd to the point where there no space for the “swap” file, or it maybe you’ve picked up some malware. Hdd tend to just die when there unhappy (either just one day or over a couple of week with constant ‘crashes’ as a symptom), not decide to go on a “go slow”. Easy enough to check, go to “my computer” and select the primary disc, the details should be shown on the left hand side or right click it and select properties for further info. Windoze tends to like around 10% of the disc free to complete operations, though you can run it with a lot less and not a lot of performance loss. If it is “full”, then just run the disc clean up utility to start wit, this should give you a fair amount of space back – it there’s on the page you get when you goto the hdd’s properties.

Check the CPU is running at its intended speed. Hold down your Windows key and press the Pause/break key to bring up System Properties, the speed should be stated towards the bottom of the page (General tab).

It’s unlikely but an easy check. My gf’s laptop ‘mysteriously’ reset itself to half it’s capability once, was taking an age just to launch a browser…

Cold not a problem. Silicon chips love the cold – the colder the better.

XP slows down over time – all the updates I suppose. Just reinstalled XP on an aging laptop that was unuseably slow and now it’s fine but once it’s back up to SP3 maybe it’ll be rubbish again.

Xp slowing over time and “last week my desktop suddenly slowed down” are different things, but yes mudshark it’ll be slower once SP3 is installed, but not as slow as it was.
A good wipe and re-install does help, but I doubt it the cause in this case.

Here is something you should check:

First, open ‘Device Manager’. (‘Control Panel’ > ‘System’ > ‘Hardware’ > ‘Device Manager’)

Look down the list to ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers’.
Click the + to expand and double click ‘Primary IDE Channel’

This opens the properties window. Click on ‘Advanced Settings’ tab.

Now check that ‘Current Transfer Mode’ is ‘Ultra DMA’.

If the transfer mode is ‘PIO’ then that is your problem.

You will need to select ‘DMA’ but often this is not possible. If that is the case then right click on ‘Primary IDE Channel’ in ‘Device Manager’ and choose ‘uninstall’. Don’t worry, this doesn’t do any harm and windows detects hardware on restart and automatically sets it up.

Then restart, follow steps to change ‘Transfer Mode’ to ‘DMA’ and will probably require a restart again. And hopefully everything will running fine again.

thanks all, looks like i owe some beers! and top marks to kunstler. it was the ultra dma thing.

out of interest why did it change to PIO?

Something Czech and a bit special or a San Miguel please. 😀

It happens if you get too many CRC errors (Cyclic Redundancy Check) which is when the computer can’t read a disc – perhaps a badly burned or scratched CD.

I had the same problem last year and though I’ve had it in the past, I couldn’t remember what it was/how to solve it. Guess where I got the help from? STW to the rescue again.

I was going to suggest the hard disk thing (it happened to me before) but I couldn’t remember any of the proper terms for any of it, so was unlikely to help 🙂

Feeling the STW love 😀

It’s good to find stuff like this in between the arguing 😆