MIke,

You said "... the HDD hammers like crazy...".

Have you defragmented the drive?.

My system (and everyone I set up) runs scandisk and defragment every month.
I have one client that works heavily with the newsgroups and after about two
weeks, her machine has a significant performance drop.  She is set to defrag
every two weeks.

Jim Meagher
=====
Micro Solutions Consulting        Member of The HTML Writers Guild
http://www.ezy.net/~microsol     International Webmasters Association
410-543-8996                MS Site Builder Network - Level 2 member
=====
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Buraczewski <[log in to unmask]>




> Hello to all
>
> A customer has given me a machine to attempt to find a hardware problem
with
> it, and I am at a loss.
>
> The machine is a custom built box with an Intel TC430HX motherboard, 32 mb
> of ram, Maxtor 2GB HDD, and Win 95a, IE 5.  I checked this machine for
> viruses.
>
> The problem as defined by the customer is this:  When using MS Office
> products, especially Word, when he selects File/Print it takes as much as
2
> minutes for the print dialog box to appear on the screen.  After the print
> dialog has appeared for the first time, the next time he attempts to print
> the dialog box pops up instantly.  This is a recent change identifed
during
> the last 6 wks or so.  He worked with MS for a couple of days, trying to
> make adjustments to the Win.ini file and other solutions.  Ultimately, MS
> threw up their hands and said "Hardware!"  Now it is my problem.
>
> I tested this and found that all of the common dialog boxes are slow, but
> especially the print dialog and not only in MS Office products, but also
in
> WordPad.  If I run in Safe Mode the dialog box pops up instantly.  If I
> delete the Win.ini file, the machine works well until I install any
printer
> drivers, then it gets flakey again.
>
> At times, this machine overall moves like molassas.  The mouse is
extremely
> slow, and the HDD hammers like crazy.  At other times, it seems to work
okay
> except for the dialog box problems.
>
> If I move the HDD to another machine it has the same problem.  If I put
> another HDD on the customers box, it performs perfectly.  This would seem
to
> narrow it down to the HDD.  I have tested the HDD with simple read/write
> testing software and got not errors over a 12 hour period.  Scan disk
shows
> no errors.
>
> I have removed IE5 [identified as loaded about 6 wks ago], but have no
> changes.
>
> Can anyone suggest where to go next?  The customer is willing to simply
> format the drive or replace it which we will do.  I on the other hand have
> become intrigued and am looking for an answer in addition to the HDD
> replacement.
>

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