Re-installed XP (again)

I can read a couple of things into this - they may or may not be correct so take it with a grain of salt. Looks to me like your drives are indeed capable of much better peformance than you are currently getting and my guess, underline guess, is that you indeed need to install some chipset or more commonly referenced motherboard drivers. I personally don'y think you are getting maximum performance out of your IDE busses and perhaps same is true on your SATA bus. IF you can set your drives for DMA, that may help some. Just go into device manager and selecta drive and check the option for DMA. Then reboot.

PC Pitstop - For comparison, just clocked a 1489 with 10 points lost due to data fragmentation. Will have to do some cleanup and then see if we can punch through 1500.

 

So far, this AM i haven't been able to get pcpitstop to load.
Will try again later.

thanks for feedback,

 

Just hit 1500 .......... No more, no less. Tried that trial version of Diskeeper Pro to defrag. (thanks to Christer).

 

Pete:
SMART would have to be "some" - usually an option on everything HDD-wise. As to his ATA33 settings, could be BIOS incorrect or more likely, Chipset drivers - could also be cheap 40 wire cables - nothing surprises me anymore.

 

I just re-installed the latest chipset (from Intel, not Gateway) and there was
absolutely no settings changed (from my previous post above).

In order to update the BIOS (From Intel's site), According to their
instructions, i have to disable the "active desktop ". How do i do that?? I
found some instructions on how to disable it but when i looked, i didnt have
what they were asking for (check box, tab, switch something.......

thanks,

 

I'm not yet suggesting you flash the BIOS. You can enter the BIOS and check your settings however - this may permit you to do some fine tuning but, you want to be careful lest you turn this into a doorstop. Best Bios guide is here

 

Rockstr2u,
Understand. no responsibility attached, no problem.

I flashed my bios on previous systems with no problems. The key is
making sure you get the right one for your sys.

thanks,