computer slowing up

[matrickz]

I have an AMD 1.7gh machine. not the fastest but not too bad. Ran out of disk space and at the same time decided to upgrade from 512mb to a gig. Put in a 500gb drive as D: replacing a 30gb unit. Slave off the c drive cable. Had a pc2300 512 stick in the unit and bought a 512 pc2700 stick. System hardware installed fine. No tech issues that mattered. Also had a 80 and 150 external USB set of drives. Re-adjusted things and now have 40gb plus free on c, 412 on d and 60gb on the 150 usb. Removed the 30 and the 80 and selling those. Ok after this long winded description let me get to the issue at hand.

I finally started to use the machine exactly as before but with what I thought would be better resources and a faster machine. WRONG. It got so bad that the mouse itself was jerking around. Audio and video were useless. Basically the only way to speed things up was by stopping one of the programs I normally run all night. Even after stopping that app it still was bad but only just adequate. Taskmanager shows idle usually over 90% so no clue what is the cuase. Also checked system settings and they all look good. Any clues would be welcome (I plan on pulling the new ram to see if that might be the cuase - this weekend).

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Are any of hard drives or CD/DVD's old? Is there any noise coming from the hard drive like clicking. The drives can drag a computer down alot if there old and going bad. But it couldnt hurt to check your ram either. Is your system compatable with a 2700 ram chip?

 

[OmegaWeapon]

What are the specs of your computer? There are tons of things that could go wrong with the computer, especially since you did a lot of moving things around and stuff. Also, depending on the version of windows you have might actually play on how the new bigger hard drive works. The ram might also be bad, as in the stick not working correctly and telling the system that it is slower than it actually is. In this case, then the one you already had would slow down also to maintain a normal level. Check to see if everything was read properly. I'll let you know if there is anything else that I think of.

 

[matrickz]

define old ... none of the drives are more then a couple of years. 500gb is brand new. The 150usb is about 2 years old. The 150 internal is 2 years old. Doubt it is drive related however. I think it could be the memory and I will pull the new stick out tonight and test it again. Seems not to be related to only one app since it can slow down even with the one program shut off. One common factor is that the slow down seems to be related to programs that do file downloads. Thing is that I didn't get near the ethernet card and I never touched software settings. Simply installed the drive and RAM then buttoned things up. The memory is 'seen' by the computer so it hasn't completely failed if that is a thing to check. I will run memory diags tonight also. Regarding the compatibility - I went to the Crucial Memory website and ran their java tool to determine the right thing to buy. I used their suggestion (but not their product). Standard ddr 400 pc2700 stuff. Faster then my old RAM but it steps down.

 

[icantflybfplane]

well i dunno the 2700 ram is slower then the 3200 right? well it will slow down the 3200 to the 2700 speed but something thats not that noticable...if ur idling at 90% then some sorta of software is trying to run its *** off on ur comp....try defraging all drives, make sure u have all windows updates and all drivers up to date, take the ram out and reseat it, clean the case out of any crap and see what happens after that

 

[OmegaWeapon]

If the slowdown occurs when your downloading something, it might be related to the way the data is being processed and stored, which might be related to the hard drive. If windows can detect it all, then there might a storing problem within the drive itself.

 

[matrickz]

couple of additional bits of info

first the memory is a 2300 not a 3200 as mentioned above so in this case the new 2700 would be doing the slow down. I removed the new unit and it still is acting up. Seems to mainly be related to just doing downloads. One of the threads mentioned the hard drive and I thought there might be something there but then I realized that these programs download to the C: drive which has not been touched (I then offload files to the new D: drive upon completion). The case is pretty clean so no dust build up. On the defrag idea - analyze said it isn't needed. I will also try the older version of the download software and see if that helps