slow boot, slow PC, choppy sound

[Ian_Ridley]

Dell Inspiron 1300
Win XP v5.1 SP2 build 2600.xpsp_sp2_qfe.070227-2300
Intel Pentium 1396 Mhz
512 Mb RAM
AV/ Firewalls running: AVG Free Edition (fully up to date), Windows Firewall
Usual browser Firefox
Email client Thunderbird

Problems:
Boot takes 4 mins, PC seems very sluggish compared to start of Dec, sound is choppy in all video and mp3 players and so are system sounds.

This appeared to happen over Christmas. Recent major changes:
- upgrade to itunes v7.5 to allow Ipod to be plugged into PC
- Win media player upgrade to v11

I have rolled all of these back, updated the sound driver, cleaned the registry, run chkdsk, defragged, scanned with AVG and the F-secure online scanner, uninstalled several small programes that are no longer needed using add/remove, cleaned out the junk (tmp files etc) from my hard disk using CCleaner and ATf Cleaner.

This seems similar to:
http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com...eed-sound.html

I will say that the battery is totally flat and won't recharge - I am getting a new one and I don't have the 2007 BIOS upgrade installed. I can only do this once I have the new battery as it needs a min 10% charge to let you flash the BIOS.

[Monty007]

Hi Ian, I bois upgrade will not make the PC faster. It's only needed when you have a certain problem.
What I would do is see what is running in task manager once you have booted the PC. Also you can use msconfig to see what programs are running in start up.

Have you tried a full virus and anti-spyware scan? Go to this link download and install super anti spyware http://www.superantispyware.com/

Here is another link that might help http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...storeperf.mspx

How old are the chipset and video drivers? http://support.dell.com/support/down...&catid=&impid=

[Ian_Ridley]

Sorted this.

It was a UDMA / PIO problem with the IDE controller. AVG was taking ages to make a scan but only using 4% of my CPU. That got me thinking. I used Process Explorer and found a lot of CPU being used by Hardware Interrupts.

A Google on that found:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduc...duck/udma_fix/

& from there:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=817472

I've got SP2 so I can only guess I got 6 consecutive errors, which triggered the downgrade to PIO. Perhaps my HD is getting a bit long in the tooth. If so I'll see this problem again and will go after a new one.

[townie2109]

hey ian,

thanks for the post!

i actually went ahead and completely reformatted my HD and reinstalled XP and thought i had the problem fixed. however, it is back, and im hoping your solution is the right one. ive been trying to read the two links you gave me, but its a lot of reading and its hard to understand. i was wondering if maybe you could explain to me quickly what exactly is going on and how to fix it

thanks!