Sluggish HD reading.

Factual Questions
1

My desktop PC is a P4 3GHZ with one GB of ram.

Easily the oldest part of the comp is the Hard disk. I can’t remember the exact age, or even it’s age to within a few months, but it is at least 2 years old, So it’s probable a lot slower than today’s drives.

It’s been defraged recently and it has over 2GB of free space, yet the computer only has to be on with no applications running for me to hear frantic HD reads. And when I’ve got 7 windows open (quite common) it starts to struggle, with significant pauses between input and result.

This phenomenon seems to have started around the time I got my laptop (similar specs but with a newer hd and a better graphics card) so maybe I am just noticing the contrast.

when I do Ctrl-alt-del and look at the performance stats, the CPU usage is rougly 10% and the pf usage is around 200MB (but it’s currently 600MB for some reason)

According to Adaware and spybot my system is completely free of slime.

I realize this is a difficult problem to solve based on the above information so I will ask a relatively simple question - do you know of any good free benchmarking suites I can download that will test my hard disk (along with everything else) and give me an indication of how it compares to a modern hard disk?

2

On reflection, it could have something to do with the fact that one of the windows contains a thread (from a different MB) of 40 high-res pictures of Christina Aguilera :rolleyes:

That said. the op still applies. the computer really does seem to struggle with moderate multi-tasking hard disk usage.

3

Go here

look up your drive class and see what the benchmarks say

It sounds like you have a fairly speedy sub-system.

2 gigs is not that much freespace - When mine get to the last few gigs they start bogging down. Just Get a bigger drive. Huge, fast drives are super cheap these days. 120 gig units are $ 40 after rebate.

see Western Digital 120GB Internal Hard Drive

What are the drive specs? What is the formatting NTFS or FAT32? If you can do NTFS go for it as it is somewhat less prone to fragging.