Slow HD?

My computer has been running pretty slow for a while and I cant figure out why. I've got a Pentium 4 2.80Ghz processor and 700mb ram, and I usually dont have much running at any given time. If I have itunes open, and try to open anything else it freezes up for a bit and the sound gets choppy. It's been taking 1:30-2:00 minutes to boot up, and I've been having trouble using Frooty Loops. I've tweaked windows to get rid of all the unecesary stuff at startup and used CCleaner to fix the registry. I just tried HD Tune, and found that my HD's peak transfer rate is only 2.6mb/sec, this was at least ten times slower than anything else on the list of average times HD Tune has on their website. It says the health is okay, so I dont know why it's going so slow. Does anyone know if this could be causing my computer to be running so slow? Or how to fix it?

 

What speed is your hard drive, what is it's size and how full of it?
Have you run defrag a few times in a row?

 

It's 40 gigs and I've got about 12 gigs of free space left. I havent defragged in a while though, I was going to do that tonight. I'm not sure what speed it is, is there anywhere I can find that out?

 

Everest home edition is a free program that will figure you out the speed of your HDD, along with lots of other things.

 

Thanks for the link, that's a useful program. I found out my hard drive is 4,200 rpm.

 

Hrm, okay, I would defrag it 2 or 3 times in a row. Preferably with Diskkeeper.

 

allright, I'll try that.

 

Has the HDD interface dropped into PIO mode? Look in Device Manager > IDE/ATAPI Controller > Primary IDE Channel > Advanced Settings. The transfer mode should be DMA if available and the current transfer mode for Device 0 should be DMA.

John