PC Performance Problems

[brooky]

Alright guys, Ive had my PC around a year and a half now and has always ran well and virus free.

The problem is that since a couple of weeks ago it began to run really slow and if I was listening to music and went to open another program i.e Firefox, the music would stutter until the new program had fully opened.

Fed up of this horrible performance I decided to run a diagnostics test on PCpitstop.com.

Everything passes with flying colours except the hard drive.

It says :

TIP > Unusually low disk performance
Drive C has an uncached speed of 2 megabytes per second.

For comparison, systems with the same CPU and clock speed as this one have a speed of 36.13 MB/s.

Now it said the same thing about my second drive when I had that in so this is making me think its a problem with something else rather than the HD's. Ive transfered shit loads of stuff to my 320gb external and defragged etc but its made no difference at all.

So , to you guys does this sound like a mobo problem or something else, or do you think a not so simple re-install should sort things out, Although as Ive stated the HD is around 50% free and defragged.

Thanks in advance

Jake
____________________
Suzuki GSX-R 750 K6.

[xlfive]

Delete unneeded files and defragment your disk to see if it improves performance. ALso disable any software you have that may be running in the background

[techierob]

you'll need to determine whether the slow disk speed is down to excessive disk traffic or whether it's a hardware fault.
If you're running a unix os, then you can just run iostat to get an overview of traffic on each controller, disk and partition. If you're running windows, then the performance monitor should give you an idea of how much the disk is getting thrashed, although if it's a trojan causing the disk traffic then there's a better-than-average chance that it would have modified the performance monitor to disguise its presence, so putting your ear to the disk might be a more reliable method.
Is the disk formatted as NTFS? If not, then try booting off a knoppix live cd and testing the disk speeds with that. If the problem goes away, then it's almost certainly a software issue.

If there's no unusual disk activity, then it could be a hardware fault. If the disk is IDE/ATA then it could be either the motherboard, the cable or traffic bottleknecking somewhere on the disk controller. Does your disk share an IDE chain with another drive? If so, I'd first suggest you explicitly jumper them as master and slave rather than rely on cable-select. If there's a cd/dvd drive sharing the controller, then maybe there's just a cd in there that's causing the disk controller to get swamped or else the audio cable has got disconnected from the sound card. To make sure, try disconnecting any other devices using the same controller and see if it alters the speed at all.
If the disks are SATA, then check if there's been any recent changes to the drivers and if they're SCSI, check that the disk(s) are jumpered correctly for their ID and that the chain's terminated.

If none of that sheds any light on things, then try reseating all the cables. If that doesn't fix anything, then you'll need to test the disk out with a new ribbon and/or test the system with an alternative disk to see if the problem still exists with that.