Software cause of HD slowdown?

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baroquejim

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I was recently noticing sluggish performance of my laptop, especially boot times. So I ran HDTune and its tests gave me a maximum transfer rate of 2.6 MB/s - normally it hovers around 30 MB/s. Something drastically wrong.

Everyone was telling me it was a sign my HD was about to fail, so I grudgingly prepared the laptop for return to the manufacturer. This involved

1) Replacing one of the original 256MB RAM sticks that I had replaced with a (slower) 512MB one.

2) Doing a factory restore using the recovery disks.

Lo and behold - HD problem solved! I'm getting 30MB/s again.

Any ideas what was causing the problem? Someone told me it could have been faulty RAM or the fact that the 512MB stick was at 266MHz while the other 256MB stick was 333MHz. I don't see how that would affect the HD though.

So could it have been software related? Some XP service that I had disabled (I always try and disable uneccassary ones as per the various guides you see on the internet)....or a virus, maybe? I just never heard of a virus that slows down your HD transfer rate.

Any ideas would be appreciated.
 
Hmmmm..... interesting I would put it on your HDD being f'cked how long had you had it for
 
If it's screwed, then how come a factory restore completely fixed the problem? Factory restore is a software operation.

I've had the drive for 5 months.
 
It's on, but that is not enough to slow the data transfer rate to 2.8MB/s. As far as I know, the indexing service does not affect a test like HD Tune, with which I used to measure the rate.
 
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