Low Voltage

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Rouen said:
I replaced the weak one, the Thermaltake Silent Power 420W with an Antec True Power 430 Watt. The voltage is much better and much more steady. However, even with this PSU, the performance has not changed. The question, why?

Because your power supply was not the issue, and the thermaltake was a great power supply.
 
Sounds like a 'software' problem to me, XP is still not perfect, and is often affected by some of the tweaking things we do.

Several suggestions. Run a good 'registry cleaning' program to get rid of the junk. Run a simple performance program to check out different pieces of hardware, such as Nortons "Performance" or one of the freebies off the internet. This will either identify the hardware that is not performing or will tell you that the hardware is OK.

A reinstall of XP will sometimes clear up software problems; and a reformat clean install does wonders. Time consuming, etc. but as a last resort, it usually works.

If doing the above does not work, I would suspect the hard drive, as every now and then we have hard drives that slowly fail as well.

But, before I rebuilt my computer, I would resolve all software issues first.
 
I got the computer fixed. I will explain how I did it.

It was not a Windows XP problem. It was not a hardware problem.

I looked in Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, and clicked on Primary IDE Controller (the 2nd one, there are two with that name)

I clicked the Advanced Settings tab and found that it was set to PIO 0, instead of DMA. Thus, load times were extremely slow. This happened because a feature in my hard drive, called SMART, detected too many read/write errors which occured because of the low voltage. After so many errors were recorded in its cache, it changed DMA to PIO 0 to slow it down and reduce the number of errors.

I uninstalled the controller, then restarted. Windows created a new driver, and Windows loaded in 10 seconds :)

Hip Hip Hurray! Never would have guessed that huh?
 
I went over the problem with a friend of mine. I was trying to narrow what the problem was without having to RMA everything. He's a guy I know in Texas, a store manager there. He almost knew right away what it was, and I wanted to f**k him right then and there. This computer was a 1500 dollar investment.
 
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