VERY slow W3J, please help !

Hey guys,

This is just getting ridiculous .. Everything on my W3J has slowed down to a crawl. Booting into XP can take up to 10 minutes ! And once it's in, another 10 minutes to load everything in startup.

It's as if the computer is just stalling .. I mean the HD light is continuously on, but the CPU is at 0-5% only. Could this be caused by a virus/malware ? Or could it be a hardware issue ? I need some advice. Thanks in advance !

Cheers.

 

i would go and check to see if your hd went into pio mode....it should be udma.

if it is in udma, i would check your processes for suspicious programs and run an anti-virus software. then i would run your hd manufacturer's diagnostic tool and memtest.

 

wait...what? I didn't even understand most of that. What do the acronyms stand for, what do the modes mean, why would HDD switch without prompting, or what is the prompt? How can you check the mode?

 

Going into PIO mode will not take 10 minutes to boot.

 

I would concur about the Process check, AV and then HD diagnostic. It sounds like something new has cropped up and is trying to break it.

 

No, it's not in PIO mode. I'm running an AVAST scan now, see if it picks up anything. Thanks for your help guys.

BTW, what diag tool should I use ?

Cheers.

 

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1161/

though this one is about cd/dvd drive....still applies to hd.


and to mr. pidgeon:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

nice little iso that has all the utilities you need.

 

Control Panel, Administrative tools, Computer Management, Device manager, Primary IDE Channel, right click Properties, Advanced tab. If the Transfer Mode has been reset or changed from dma (by whatever, wierd things sometimes happen) it can ruin the data transfer rate, as I understand it.

 

I think I had my w3j slow down a lot from CLI.exe (for catalyst) a while back. I ended up reinstalling catalyst and it seemed to fix it. However I can't really remember if it was as drastic as your slowdown. Also I'm not sure if this could explain the initial slow start. Do you have this running right at startup? Try turning it off in your processes if you have it on... (you don't actually need it running in your processes if you don't change the settings around often).

 

No, I don't even have Catalyst installed.

Thanks for that link ejl !

Cheers.

 

Having alot of programs starting up can make boot times longer but 10min is ridiculous.

Use msconfig to see if you have any unnessary programs from starting up


Also this thread from overclock.net has some recommendation to increase boot time.
http://www.overclock.net/faqs/20760-how-lower-boot-speed-15-seconds.html

Also defrag your hard drive.

 

Thanks all

 

Check the health of the drive too. I'd use HD tune and use the full health scan. Also, run the full benchmark and make sure the graph looks right...

~ Brett

 

This doesn't look to promising

HD Tune from W3J review:



MY HD Tune:



According to HD Tune, the health of my HDD is "OK" across the map ..

What should I do ?

 

Something is definitely amiss there. The early transfers over the first 20% on the interior part of the drive are probably what's killing your bootup, as that's consistently running around the 0.1MB minimum, and the repeated drops over the remainder of the drive don't look any better. The access time random points look ok. Still, it doesn't look like a software or process problem anymore.

The only other thought I have would be to check the BIOS settings for the HD and make sure that something didn't get changed in there that could be affecting the mb's communication with the HD. Else, it may be time to contact Asus/Fujitsu about RMAing the hard drive.

In the meantime, I would back up your critical files and data right away - just in case.

 

- Check Task Manager to make sure that nothing is hogging all the CPU and that there aren't any strange programs running.
- Check the Event Viewer to see if there are any ftdisk errors. If there are any block errors or things of the sort, I would start backing up the disk ASAP.
- Are you sure it isn't simply the CPU overheating? There was talk about some people with earlier W3s and Z63As that were getting slowdowns and crashes and solved the problem simply by clean the CPU/GPU heatsink...

 

always use your hd manufacturer's diagnostic tool over hdtune. it gives a more thorough check up.

 

Immediately backup anything important on the HD. Personally, I would then send it back to Asus with the HD specified as the problem so as to get it back as soon as possible. As ejl noted, try the Fujitsu HD diagnostic program which may be more enlightening. At this stage though, I'd say it's highly likely something went wrong with with the HD, not software...

~ Brett