Hi everyone, I purchased a computer about 2 years ago and it was perfect until just recently. It is a: P4 3.0ghz 1GB DDR400 Ram 1 DVD Drive 1 CD Drive 430Watt Power Supply 250GB IDD Hard Drive It isn't the software that causes the freezing because I reformatted the HD (or the Partition anyway). The only conclusion I can come up with is that the Hard drive is old. Can anyone see anything I am missing here? I was thinking of purchasing a SATA II Hard drive as a replacement and storing the O/S on that, while using the IDD Hard drive for storage. Do you think that this will fix it? Or alternatively I could backup everything onto DVD and put up with the freezing until it fully crashes, then purchase a new computer. Let me know what you guys think. Cheers
Make sure your IDE drive is setup to run as DMA and not PIO. Also you need to make sure all your IDE drives are correctly hooked up, example don't have 2 IDE's on the same cable setup as master. Also are you using any antispyware software on your computer? Is this computer running xp or vista? Also don't overlook other hardware, a bad onboard soundcard will cause your cpu to run at 100 percent even with no load. Do a ctrl/alt/del and check you cpu usage on the task manager with no programs running? It should be at less than 5 percent. I doubt you have a bad hard drive. Hard drives only read and write, they rely on the motherboard to feed it the information, in other words it's only as slow or as fast as the rest of the computer.
Hey Jony214, thanks for the reply. What does DMA and not PIO mean? The jumper settings on all the drives are as follows: Primary Connector: HDD - Master Secondary Connector: CD and DVD drive set on cable select. I'm using AVG 8.0 and running 32 bit XP Service Pack 3. It's funny that you should mention my sound card because it was playing up recently (as in the left channel was only working). But both channels are working and I checked the CPU usage and it's doesn't exceed 5% with no programs running.
Actually, if your HDD has suffered a shock, and you have harmed the magnetic plate, you will have a freezing problem. Have you recently installed new hardware? Try removing things like PCI-E cards, and all USB things (excluding mouse and keyboard). You might also find the PSU is a cheap one, and is in need of replacement due to undervoltage. If you want to save some trouble, take it to your local PC store, and they will have the tools to check your PSU, and the knowledge to find out if it's another problem.
To check your hard drives dma/pio status go to my computer/control panel/system/hardware/device manager/ide ata/atapi controllers/ Next check each controller primary secondary ide channels/ advance settings/ this is where you will find what your settings are. If your hard drive setting is set to PIO it will create problems (PIO is the slow setting on a hard drive). Also it wouldn't hurt to make your dvd/cd roms master and slave instead of cable select. Sometimes the little insignificant things can cause you problems. One final thing that has been know to cause slowdown is corrupted hard drives/partitions. You can do a chkdsk c: /f on all your partitions or a scandisk (with the box to fix errors checked). A corrupted hard drive will keep working but be very slow when accessing files.
I checked the settings and all are set to DMA if available. This morning I was playing around with it and tried changing the Hard drive jumper settings from master to cable select (I thought if all were cable select it would help). And the computer hasn't frozen since. I'm going to leave it on overnight to test this and if it hasn't frozen then I think it's solved Would it be better to leave them all cable select or change them to master/slave?
I ended up using a PCI sound card instead of the motherboard Realtek AC97. And the hard drives are on cable select. This has fixed it. SO thanks to everyone for helping out. Hope I can help you when (if ) you have problems.
If your pc is a Dell then the drives should be set to cable select. I'm on my fourth and they are all cable select. Glad you got it fixed with a sound card.
