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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (126126)	1/26/2001 8:24:32 PM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, Spending an extra $50 on a disk is a much better investment than an extra $100 on the CPU. If you build your own, you can get the latest, highest performance IDE drives with virtually no premium. The problem is that the complete systems you buy out there contain trailing edge product, basically the cheapest the OEM could get their hands on. Joe

To: Scumbria who wrote (126126)	1/26/2001 9:01:52 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: I am serious. The disk in the Athlon box is deadly slow Have you checked this page for drivers? support.micronpc.com Some IDE controllers are no good with the default windows drivers. Go to Device Manager, then to Devices->IDE/ATAPI controllers (it may be listed as a SCSI controller)->Primary IDE channel->Properties->Driver and see what you're using (on Win2K, it's slightly different on 98/ME). Use "update driver" to replace the generic windows driver with your motherboard's specific driver if necessary. It should find the driver on the CD that came with the system, if the drivers on Micron's web site are newer, save them somewhere on your hard drive then use "specify a location" to browse for them during the update process. Back up files like documents that you've created on the machine before you do this. (the OS and programs can just be reinstalled if the new driver hoses your system. Which is very unlikely, but possible. Safe mode or last known good configuration should let you go back to the old driver, but just in case....) The Micron/XP lists the following drives as having been available: Hard Drives IBM Telesto 60GB ATA100 7200RPM HDI001616-xx Samsung 40.8GB V11 ATA100 5400RPM HDI001614-xx Samsung 20.4GB V11 ATA100 5400RPM HDI001613-xx Western Digital 40GB IDE ATA100 7200RPM HDI001612-xx Western Digital 20GB IDE ATA100 7200RPM HDI001611-xx Western Digital 20.5 GB ATA100 7200RPM HDI001575-xx IBM Telesto 20.5GB IDE ATA100 7200RPM HDI001501-xx If you have one of the Samsungs, get a new drive and use the Samsung for backups or as a paperweight. They are slow and have (or used to have) a much higher failure rate than other drives. It is also possible for a CD-ROM or DVD drive to slow down the transfer rate on a shared IDE channel. If your drive is sharing a channel with a non-drive device, you could try moving the non-drive device to your secondary IDE channel. This shouldn't be necessary on a commercial pre-configured system, but if all else has failed.... By the way, have you tried calling or emailing Micron tech support? It's also possible that the mode for your hard drives IDE channel isn't set to, at least, ATA-4. It's also possible that power saving is on and the system keeps spinning down the disk (kill all power management modes in a desktop, they result in almost no reduction in power use, and terrible things can happen. One of our students had power saving shut off the CPU fan on his Duron 700 system. He heard the temp alarm go off from the motherboard (Asus A7V) and the Asus probe software showed a temp of 130 degrees centigrade! The machine and chip were fine, but he will never use power management again! One last thing to check is that the bios is configured for Plug and Play OS (unless you're using NT4). Performance often takes a big hit if Plug and play is disabled on the motherboard and the OS is looking for configuration information. Everything I've seen shows your Micron to be the fastest commercial uniprocessor system built, when properly configured. And the difference between PC1600 and PC2100 appears to be negligible. So my guess is that there's a good chance that either you have one of the 5400RPM Samsung drives (they should never have even offered such a drive for a PC like yours), a bios configuration problem, or, for whatever reason, the IDE driver for your motherboard's controller didn't get installed and you're using the default windows driver. Regards, Dan