System slow as hell....

deadl0ck

HI All,
i was having some problems with my system being slow, and I realised I hadn't installed the Via 4 in 1 chipset drivers on Wnidows XP. I assumed this would sort me out and I HAD planned on overclocking my system and I posted a Thread about it here

The system Specs are as follows:

Athlon XP3000+2.167Ghz Barton CPU
Asus A7V8X-X mobo
1 GB (2 X 512MB) PC3200 DDR 512MB RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Atlantis PRO 128MB Graphics Card

I had thought the system was pretty sluggish as sometimes the mouse is a bit stuttery/jumpy and apps can take overlong to start, however, my mate was over the other night and I was copying stuff off his Maxtor USB 2.0 HDD and it took 3 hours to copy 20GB of MP3s - WTF ???
That's when I thought about the 4 in 1 drivers, and the fact that the BIOS wa never updated

So, got home last night and booted up Windows (XP Pro) and it took about 4 minutes (pretty slow I reckon), downloaded the latest Via 4 in 1 drivers from viaarena.com and also, the latest BIOS from the manufacturer's site.

I updated everything and it's still bloody slow - I tried to copy a 1.4GB file to my USB 2.0 HDD and windows was predicting 15 minutes for the copy (BTW, one of the guys in work copied 50GB of MP3s from a Maxtor USB 2.0 HDD yesterday and it took 19 minutes).

If I go into device manager and check USB it has "USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller" and if I veiw by connection, I can see the external HDD is connected to this...

Finally, I had a look in my BIOS in case there's some weird setting about USB and I saw that my CPU temperature is at 65 C, and it's not an overclocked system.

Oh yeah, before anyone asks, I have sod all running on my system - nothing eating up the CPU cycles in the background. Memory usage is at about 180MB after boot up.

So - where to now ?
I plan to get some thermal paste and reseat the Heatsink on my CPU and the I'm gonna reinstall windows XP Pro and see how that goes...

Has anybody any other suggestions/ideas as to what the hell might be going on ?

daywalker

there is a known problem between XP and some VIA USB2 chipsets, where the chipset does not detect devices and/or devices run at usb1.1 speeds,

have a look here:
http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=16&threadid=66201&enterthread=y

it seems that you have to contact microsoft to get the files needed, or wait until service pack 3 comes out for XP :mad:

deadl0ck

Hmm...That seems to be more of a USB 2.0 devieces not detected, but it may be the same thing.

I can get it along with a load of other post SP2 fixes here:

http://ryanvm.msfn.org/

Thanks - It's worth a try !

StoneMad

It seems that there are developer drivers in beta stage on the via ftp site.

I will have a closer look at this when I get home.

DemonOfTheFall

65' is too hot for an athlon xp. when i had a 3000+ it would crap out all the time if it hit 60'.

as far as your chipset drivers, they should always be the absolute first thing u install on a fresh installation of windows. if u dont install them first, i find that it just F***s everything up and youll always have random problems...

deadl0ck

Just bought an artic cooler heatsink and fan and will install that first thing when I get a chance.

deadl0ck

Update - got it sorted !!!

My HDD was stuck in PIO mode - I had to delete some registry keys to force it to redetect and it's now in DMA.

This was causing all the slowdown !!

mp3guy

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

65' is too hot for an athlon xp. when i had a 3000+ it would crap out all the time if it hit 60'.

Its not too hot for a barton core. My Athlon XP runs at 50c idle, and 65c on full load.

DemonOfTheFall

Fair enough, my 3000+ barton core used to always fail prime95 if it hit 60 degrees.