Octopus Overlords

While fiddling with my second PC after a reformat, I came across an odd issue. For some reason, it wouldn't boot normally - it was taking three minutes to get to the desktop, and another five minutes after that to finish loading the icons/taskbar. Basic driver installations were getting stuck whenever they had to do anything CPU dependant.

I fixed the issue by simply unplugging one of my hard drives. On a test, I plugged it back in and unplugged my DVD drive - it worked fine that way, too. As long as I have everything plugged in, it slows down or stalls. If I unplug any one of them, it works fine.

Is this a power issue?

I have a year old Enermax 350 in that machine.

Sucking up juice are:

DVD Drive
3x Hard drives (2 40GB, 1 120GB)
Radeon 9700 Pro
Soundblaster Live!

Cripes that's a alot of stuff to be running. Power supplies are pretty cheap 40 -50 bucks depends on the size. I would get a 500W power supply. Even if you don't need it now I'm sure you will down the road and there really really easy to install. My brother walked my little sister through installing one over the phone once heh.

Back in the day when I built my current computer, I was experiencing similar problems with the motherboard manufacturer's provided IDE drivers - I have an nforce2 Epox 8RDA FWIW.

Anyway, the computer ran like a dog UNTIL I uninstalled those drivers and went with the WinXP default IDE drivers.

Just a thought.

Smoove_B wrote:I was experiencing similar problems with the motherboard manufacturer's provided IDE drivers - I have an nforce2 Epox 8RDA FWIW.

Well you see, that's where we're different. I have an nforce2 Epox 8RDA3+.

Smoove_B wrote:Just a thought.

And a good one it is. I will have to try that, although I am using the Nvidia SW drivers - I will try the the WinXP defaults, if I can figure out how to switch them.

Blackhawk wrote: And a good one it is. I will have to try that, although I am using the Nvidia SW drivers - I will try the the WinXP defaults, if I can figure out how to switch them.

Easy there with your 3+ whatever that gets you.

I *think* you go into the device manager and just click on the properties for the hard drive(s) in question. There's a driver tab and you can "roll back" or uninstall. I think I just uninstalled, rebooted and let WinXp Auto install the default drivers.

As a matter of fact, I just re-did my PC Sunday afternoon and when I reinstalled the nforce2 driver package, I intentionally avoided installing the IDE drivers just based on what happened to me two years ago. Awful.