Hell's Hard Drive

So I pull my old pc from the garage (Pentium 4, 2.4ghz, 512 ram, 80gb hd, xp) you know, yesterdays $3000 alienware-competitor machine. I can not get anywhere on this thing. it is super slow, like 10 mins from start up til the windows sound, SLOW. trying to virus check with avg for the past 8 hours to find like only 1, you can feel how slow it is because it stop responding and the hdd sounds like it wants to puke. its making me want to puke.
Anyways, I want to replace the hdd with a new one.
Under device manager the disk drive is listed as ST380020A. What interface does it have? The enumerator part says IDE. So is it IDE interface?
i WOULD LOVE TO DO MY OWN RESEARCH but i dont have my lappy with me and this thing is about to pop

 

Your machine does have an IDE HDD, probably UDMA 100 or 166. You can get some drives today that have that same interface that will make your machine noticeably more snappy. A fresh XP install, and some new RAM and it would be pretty decent for basic web browsing/productivity. I like how you wrote that up though, made me laugh.

 

Dont blame the car on the drivers incompetents.

Its a Seagate IDE 5400 BTW

 

Imagine your in drivers ed. the person thats driving is hitting the brakes so hard and constantly that you want to puke. that how i feel when i even switch windows or tabs. oh great it does it now when i hit backspace.

It will be only used for internet and microsoft word.

I looked up the ram inside pc2100 MB and i realized that im missing one... somebody must've stolen it! i looked up the max it can handle pc2700 1gb per slot. (2GB max) via crucial system scanner. 60 new per piece. or i could grab it at 40/used local. maybe do some haggling and get it lower!

Im finding only Ultra ATA100 on newegg. same thing?

 

Craigslist might actually be easier.

 

Craigslist?

Any IDE drive will work just fine.

HD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136457

RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134177

You have a warranty with both

 

Yea, they're one in the same And the new ones will give you more speed because they have better caches, and are more efficient at getting data off the disks. Today's UATA drives will actually push data to the limit of the interface, whereas the older ones couldn't.

 

Why don't you keep the drive and pop it as a secondary drive for storage? All you need is a gparted live cd..

 

That should be the next step. the only problem i really have is the disk "head jumping" or sounding like it hits a speed bump or the it hiccups or.... omg there i go again saying or multiple times when i should've used commas and one or. no time to backspace other wise this hdd will struggle.
the hdd making that hard "click" sound reoccurs a month or two after being reformatted. but i guess if i put it as my 2nd drive it might not. only one way to find out.

rep sent to everyone for being such great troopers and saving me a headache & vomitting

 

I've never seen a XP machine of any age that didn't benefit from running a decent cleaner like... Ccleaner or similar.

Years of cookies and temp files make them a sluggish beast. I find a quick once over with this program makes a HUGE difference.

 

running programs like CCleaner never benefit as much as reinstalling the OS. im running a desktop with simialr specs to yours and it was just as slow when i got it from my brother for free so i reinstalled windows and its now rediculously fast at booting and is fairly quick at doing most tasks. i upgraded my memory to 1.5gb cos i had 3 slots and had lots of 512mb DDR 400 modules lying around

 

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