something is wrong with my computer, help.

[monsoon01]

ok, here we go, about a month ago i got some cheap ram at a comp. show,and my comp started running slower, well i started getting memory erros so i checked and it turned out that the memory was bad, so i took it out and went and got some good Crucial memory. Well changing the ram helped but my computer still is running slow. If I put a DVD into my dvd player it freezes the whole computer for about 5 minutes then it plays, but if i try to fast foward or anything like that it freezes up again, does the same in windows media player if i try to play AVIs or Mpegs, audio is fine, never any problems with that, but if i have 2 or more programes open and i am listening to music at the same time and open up another program there is a pause in the music while the other program loads. Also when i rip audio with my DVD drive it rips at about 12x to 13x, which is good, but if i try to rip a movie it rips at 2x, maybe 3x if i'm lucky abd if i try to a direct copy from a cd in the DVD drive to my cd burner i have to wrote at 4x or else i get a coaster. This is annoying because it slows down things when i try to load any kind of movie file and my computer is preforming like it was when i first built it which makes it feel really slow. tmpgenc works fine, same with dvd2avi, smartripper, and dvdx(gets weird green line at bottom though w/ ver.1.4). Also, if I try to run any games they take about 10 minutes to load then i get about 4fps. It sounds like there is sumthing wrong with my video card, but i got it about 3 months ago and ever thing worked fine till about a month ago. if anyone has any idea of what is wrong please let me know.

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specs:
1ghz AMD Athlon Thunderbird
384mb of Crucial PC-133
Abit KT7 Raid (w/ Via 133 chipset and ATA100 support on board)
Geforce2 Ultra w/ 64mb of DDR
2 maxtor harddrives(1st: 30 gig, ata100, 7200rpm, main drive; 2nd:30 gig, ata100, 7200rpm, capture drive)
16x pioneer DVD drive
8x4x32 HP cd burner
Win Me
(nothing is overclocked or tweaked, and all the drivers are up to date)

Thanx in advance.
-monsoon

[Hollywood004738]

You can try loading your optimized defaults in your bios.
My bios had some safe defaults for compatiblity problems. When I got some bad mem it loaded these and I had to change it back.

[monsoon01]

ok, i guess i can try that and see how it works, but if anyone else has any ideas let me know.

[zed]

Fist of all do a defrag on the hard drive and if the problem still persists check to see if DMA is enabled on the hard drive and if so disable it and reboot - is that slightly faster? if so update your ide controller drivers and re-enable dma. If not right click on my computer and get the properties and go to the performance tab (i think this is where it is - i use win 2k) and see what % of resources you have free - sounds to me like you may have a limited amount and if so do a ctrl + alt +del to see what is running in the background and slowly end task on each application apart from explorer rundll and systray and see if the speed improves if it does you should then know what application is causing it and stop it from starting or reinstall it if you really need it.

have you installed anything recently that had an immediate impact on system performance? have you got an upto date virus checker and done a thorough test (unlikely it is this but hey worth the efort anyways)

If none of the above works let me know

regards

Zed

[monsoon01]

Zed,
already tried that, defrag didnt help DMA is enabled, nothing is running in the back ground, only systray, cache,an and explorer. i have the latest virus def. and i dont have a virus. havent installed anything that i can think on that would do anything to system preformance. so Zed if you have nemore ideas, let me know.

[zed]

Did you try it with DMA disabled? have you also tried it with various hardware disabled i.e sound card, network card etc - are you using the latest via chipset drivers? if not update them, failing that can you not do a system restore on win me ? and rollback a month or whenever it ran ok (after doing a backup of recent files first!). Otherwise why not just reinstall windows (fresh install) good opportunity to have a clear out and you will find PC runs faster - my friend has same spec pc as you and is using ME and it has also slowed down - could be just the fact that windows me is pants like win 98 - when i used that i often had to rebuild every 6 weeks or so of intensive use.

All that said I still think it is a driver issue, are they all up to date? have you installed directx lately?

Zed

[lmichiel]

Well, bad memory can cause information being written wrongly on the hard disc which stays there even the memory is replaced. Just think of it as a drunken man writing something down on paper. Even when he's sober again, the stuff he has written down remains like shit.
I recommend you to reinstall Windows over you current installation and if that doesn't help, start over from scratch.
Windows Me is Microsofts most worse OS ever and if you have a change go back to Win 98 Second edition which is much more stable.

cheers
Leo

[Shifthrow]

I have the same specs as you and had to flash my bios to a more current version before dma would truly work on my pc. Before it said that it was checked but it wasn't really working. I flashed the bios and things are running more smoothly. Try flashing, its not as hard as websites and manufacturers make it out to be.
Go to http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/kt7faq.htm for information on Abit motherboards and look there for more options on speeding up your pc.

[monsoon01]

hey, thanx everyone, yea i know Me is horrible and i have a friend giving me his 98se disk so looks like my weekend will be to reinstalling everything and i cant wait to actually see what my computer can do with the new bios. thanx again everyone.