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Damn that damned PC.
I ran a performance test on it against my dual P3 box. It creamed it in everything (by massive amounts) except the disk test. The P3 got a rating of 240 something whereas the new machine got a rating of 20.5!
I played around with the BIOS (but Intel dont give you a lot to play with), even swapped IDE cables around in case they were causing an issue.
I even installed XP from scratch last night to see if that would sort it out. But no luck!
Then this morning, I checked the details on the drives and IDE controllers and found everything was set to PIO mode. Not PIO2, 3 or 4, nor UDMA Mode 1,2,3,4 or 5 (5 is what it should be), but PIO, meaning PIO mode 1. The slowest possible. It manages a fantastic 2Mb/s!
Started looking around the net this morning and found that Intel bundle their ATA drivers into an program called "Intel Application Accelerator". I hadnt installed this. This evening I will be, and then I will report back on the results. Damn Intel and their drivers... would have saved all the s/w I had installed on the C: drive :(
3.30am Tuesday morning I was awoken by Shell who sounded like she had croupe(!), so I took her to the emergency GP. She has had a throat infection for a week and its got really bad. Today however, things are starting to look better.
Thinking about going away for the bank holiday weekend. Nowhere special, just somewhere else to try and get away from it all. Gonna try ringing Bimbo again though to see if I am going to see the kids. Although I suspect my calls will just be diverted like they have been the last few weeks.
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