Two weeks ago I rebuilt an old 350 Mhz Celeron system for a friend who
had previously been using a 486 (!!!) to surf the web. The system is
based upon a PC Chips mobo (no laughing, please), and came with a
Seagate 3 GB hard drive and 32 megs of PC66 or EDO RAM (DIMM's). I
replaced the RAM with 192 MB of Kingston PC100 SDRAM and added a
factory-reconditioned Seagate 10 GB hard drive (it's a UDMA 100 model
as I recall). I'm a firm believer in dual-hard drive systems, the
smaller one being the boot drive and the bigger one for data storage.
I installed WIN 98 and other drivers and apps without a hitch. What I
cannot for the life of me figure out is why data transfers between the
boot drive and the data drive is so damn SLOW. My old machine was a 233
Mhz AMD K6 based upon a Gigabyte mobo, with 128 MB of RAM with a 4 gig
boot drive and a 15 gig storage drive, and even it sloshed data between
drives faster than what I see with my friend's machine, which is
supposed to be faster. The most conspicuous symptom of sluggishness is
that audio files played from Drive D (the data HD) tended to skip while
being played. Also, CD's burned from files on that drive got burned at
4X or so, rather than the 8-16X I usually see with machines of that
vintage (the burner is rated at 48X). I defragged. No change. I ran a
spyware cleaner. Nothing found.
I swapped the Drive D that I installed for one from my old computer,
and it seemed to remedy the skipping-while-playing-audio-files problem,
though I noticed that file transfers fron the D to C drive were still
kind of sluggish. And while the machine seems to operate normally in
other respects, I also noticed that one of the sound apps on the boot
drive had gone flaky; if you clicked "FILE" to open a file, you get no
response, but if you clicked on the open-folder symbol to do the same
thing, no problem.
The bottom line is this - Should I suspect the extra,
factory-reconditioned hard drive I installed to hold data (as I'm
inclined to do), or is the boot drive, already 6 years old and
moderately used, on its last legs? Windows 98's IDE drivers have proven
adequate for my other systems. Do I need an IDE driver for this
machine, and if so where can I find one (PC Chips' web site and
Driverguide.com have both come up empty)? What is a good source for
20-gig-and-under hard drives fgor this type of machine (I used
compgeeks.com last time)?
Thank you in advance.
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