WHY are Games slow to load from SATA hard drive in XP?

hi

i previously had a seagate SATA 250gb 7200rpm HDD and it was slow at loading Games like the loading bar and stuttered in game for about 15 seconds until the hard drive had loaded the textures. i bought a new SATA Western digital one and i had the same problems.

gears of war is very slow to start and exit along with COD4 and loading is slow but especially in gears and textures are even slower to load in game which results in stuttering, the hard drive is always blinking.

WHAT I HAVE TRIED.
1. reinstalled drivers
2. run antivirus/spyware and registry fixers and error fixers and also defragged it a couple of times.
3.change sata cable.
4.increased the virtual memory and pageload of XP.

and yet none of this makes a noticeable difference.

windows starts at under 30 seconds so that's not the problem.

MY SPECS:

Asus M2N-MX SE motherboard
AMD athlon 4200+ dual core
1GB OCZ ddr2 ram
ati Radeon 4850 512mb gddr3

if anyone can help me that would be GREAT!!!!

ive searched all over the internet and nothing seems to lead to any solutions.

thanks

* 3 minutes ago
* - 3 days left to answer.

Additional Details

0 seconds ago
i get a transfer rate of 100MB per second from HDTUNE..... thats fast but it doesnt help whilst gaming

 

Check your hard drive configuration in the BIOS and in Windows.

Make sure it's set to Ultra DMA Mode 5 or 6.

I've got a Seagate 250GB 7,200RPM SATA 3 drive in my system and game loads are fast, of course it vary's slightly depending on the game. COD4 and Crysis are fastest while BF2 and BF2142 are slowest followed by CS:S and TF2.

 

shouid i risk a bios update im on version 0201 and vers 0501 is out.

i cant seem to find any asus sata drivers for my mobo either....

cheers

 

Might want to pop in another GB of ram. When your system runs out of ram, it uses the hard drive which is alot slower and could be the cause of your problem given HD tune show everything is fine.

 

shouid i risk a bios update im on version 0201 and vers 0501 is out.

i cant seem to find any asus sata drivers for my mobo either....

cheers

 

like i said- but now i have uninstalled nod32 and cod4 seems alot faster but gears of war is still slow at loading textures ect....

im going to post my results with an extra stick of ram....

cheers

 

Yeah, update your bios.

 

i have set it to ultra dma mode 6 but the PIO mode is currently at on auto but the disk says it supports 4- should i change it to 4?

also, does windows have anything to do with these options so they clash??

cheers

 

You need RAM bro. I have the same issue with Gears + Vista and 2 Gigs of RAM. Vista idles at around 40% RAM on my 2 Gigs, so when I launch Gears, the usage goes up to around 95~. At this point, the system starts utilizing the HDD for extra RAM, hence, the slower read and write speeds lead to stuttering in the game.

 

thanks for the conformation- i sort of just figured it out aswell- i uninstalled nod32 and then cod4 was lightning fast- but, gears is much more resource hungry than cod4 so the memory is definatly the bottleneck.

thanks for the conformation- i shall post my results

 

tried an extra gig of OCZ ram- exact same as the one i already had installed- and my computer wouldnt boot- no bios beep or anything, just a black screen.

any ideas, i hope its the memory and not my slot so i dont have to buy a new mobo.

 

Run memtest to figure that out.

 

it works in the other computer so im going to swap the the sticks round and then test the other ram i have.

can i have the OCZ ram with a different make of ram in my mobo??

cheers

 

To test the performance of your harddrive you could run HD Tune. Don't know if it's still necessary.

 

Don't mix and match RAM types, it isn't going to do you any good. Just run on one stick, do memtest89. If it cycles through, lets say, 6 times, i'd say it's fine. Then try the other one. Try the messed up one first.

 

ps - ram gets killed really easily.