Computer Slow as Molasses!

[raptorsoft2000]

Hey all... I have a weird problem that I really need to fix. I have an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ with 2gb of ram and plenty of hard drive space (4x200gb RAID5 into 1x560gb drive). I download quite a bit of stuff, so my hard drives have a lot of stuff on them, which is why I'm wondering if a good defrag will work to make this thing go faster, or what. I noticed my laptop seems to go faster than my server computer which is newer. Sometimes for example when playing a song the computer will make it sound all garbled, I'm guessing from too much hard disk access??
Does anyone agree it's from fragmentation, or is there another idea of why?
Thanks to anyone who can help me solve this problem!

 

[dnuggett]

It might have to do with the stripe sizing on your RAID. Use what the RAID Controller recommends...

 

[NogginBoink]

Fire up perfmon and determine what's causing the slowdown rather than guessing.

 

[Muse]

What size are your HDDs?

IDE drives?

Check in Device Manager and make sure you have Ultra DMA in effect for your IDE drives. If any of them have reverted to PIO Mode for any reason, go here and get the script that will hack your registry to force Ultra DMA.

 

[ndruw]

perhaps a little virus tagged along with all of that pr0n you've been caching?



as an edit - with that much data on your network anyways, id be scheduling my defrags, do it overnight though cuz im sure itll take awhile