adsmith82

I just built a new system for a friend and I had numerous and various blue screens and other errors installing vista. I finally got it installed and it is being very slow. It seems like the hard drive is louder than it should be and sounds strange. Some things are working fine though. Web browsing seems responsive enough, except for the time the browser installed the flash player. I can download files quickly. Just now when I tried to extract a zip file I downloaded (13mb), it says it is extracting at 3 bytes/sec and doesn't seem to get anywhere... It is a raptor drive, but even a normal drive shouldn't be this slow. I will time vista's boot time as soon as this unzip process will cancel.

OK, vista load time is about 4.5 minutes. I am thinking write performance is good, but read is not. I downloaded bootable cd images from WD at http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp (both tools and diagnostics for dos). They boot fine on my personal machine, but not on the one I am trying to test. It obviously boots fine from the vista dvd, but not these cd's I made. So I'm not sure how to tell for sure what is wrong with it.

FreoHeaveho

Go to My Computer right click on the drive in question and schedule a check disk. Restart and let it complete (it will take a while). Let us know what it reports.

adsmith82

well, I took out the ram and tested them one stick at a time. The system performs fine with one stick in. I have read some things saying that some boards have a problem using 4 gigs... or 4 stick or something... at least I have the problem narrowed down. I will have to try bios update and contact msi if that doesn't fix it. Thanks for your reply.

FreoHeaveho

yeh ok, glad you're on the scent man, but check the integruity of your disks too. bios update sounds like a good plan... let me know how you go.