Windows sluggish after Bios set to "optimized defaults" - help!

**0ldboy** · June 04, 2006, 04:58 AM

Hi folks,

Yesterday I decided it was time for a reinstall of windows xp pro becasue it was acting real sluggish, needed a good reformat and all that.

OK, at Easter my bro gave me his PC un formatted/reinstalled, everything still on there. AS for my old PC we decided to keep the hard drive with my stuff on there and bung it in the new one, this was great as I now have 1 new 153gb hard drive and my old 74gb hard drive. Seems ok so far yes? Well, when I decided to go for a reinstall I didnt format the data on my old drive, I wanted to reformat and reinstall the stuff on my new 153gb drive. So off I go and do all the crap of reinstalling etc etc, set ups etc. All OK so far. I get to windows and happily see my old drive sitting there with all my stuff on it. whoopee. this is good. HOWEVER, after an hour or so after setting up my ATI graphics drivers, and a tonne of other stuff I restart (becasue drivers prompt you to as you know). OK, during that time I had taken out my windows setup disk, and this is the shocker, on restart is said "NTLDR is missing, press CTRL ALT DEL to restart" well after researching on the net (after putting the cd back in) i decide that im not going to risk all the bother of command prompts and everything to solve this I decide to reinstall, this time wiping all crap from both hard drives.

After another half a day or so it seems I get into windows, take the cd out and restart, only this time to be confronted by "cant detect setup cd", great. So I then resort to in the bios loading the optimised deafults, something i didnt fancy doing. BUT it works, I can now get into windows without the CD in drive. BUT, after loading these defaults windows is sluggish at times, for e.g. opening a program such as the rome launcher or the TES oblivion launcher, they are slow. PLUS, windows boot times take over 2 mins. Obviously after a fresh reinstall you expect things to fly, especially fiddling with all the annoying things like stratup programs etc etc, you know, the stuff to get windows running smoothly.

My Comp specs basic are:

AMD athalon 64bit processor, 2.01ghz, 1gb ram
Graphics card: Radeon X1800
BIOS: Phoenix AWARD work Station

I think that its something to do with the computer not liking another drive being installed, with stuff on it basically, I read something like that somewhere. And I also think that optimised defaults in the bios did not help.

Basically I want to get rid of these slow boot times and occasionally sluggish happenings in windows.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks in advance, I will be over the moon if I can get things running smoothly again, this is ****ing me off as I have tonnes of revision to be doing

P.S reading over its hard to understand so please shoot if you need to ask Q's

**Incinerate_IV** · June 04, 2006, 09:43 AM

Well you can always update the BIOS. And change the BIOS to boot from hard drive first instead of CD first.

**0ldboy** · June 04, 2006, 10:26 AM

thanks for the reply, but sadly I have already booted from HD rather than CD, I have to put that back otherwise I get the "insert system disk" message on boot up. I havent updated the bios, nor am I exactly sure how to do so... Ill look into it.

But in the meanwhile, something worse has happened, I decided for one last reinstall, and upon the part of the setup where you choose which drive to partition, I found that my main HD was missing, I only had the choice of my old 75gb HD. Now I get a RAID error on loadup, and my HD isnt visible in windows, but on the plus side everthing is running smooth.

So now I dont know how the hell to reintroduce my hard drive. I know its not damaged physically, thats it.

**Incinerate_IV** · June 04, 2006, 10:33 AM

Is your hard drive SATA or IDE? If its IDE did you set the master/slave thing correctly? If its SATA you have to install SATA drivers, search on your motherboard website to find that.

**0ldboy** · June 04, 2006, 12:10 PM

IDE, and Im not too sure about the settings, thanks ill take a look incinerate

EDIT: I dunno but it looks as if I might have to rip it out of the PC, and fiddle with jumpers and plug it back in and "install" it again. crap.

**0ldboy** · June 26, 2006, 08:29 AM

Wey hey!!! Yes! Just this second got it to recognise the drive! Thanks for the help Incinerate, you were right, it needed SATA drivers, and a whole world of fiddling, didnt even have to remove the HD!!!

Thanks again!

**HorseArcher** · June 26, 2006, 07:05 PM

Originally Posted by 0ldboy

Wey hey!!! Yes! Just this second got it to recognise the drive! Thanks for the help Incinerate, you were right, it needed SATA drivers, and a whole world of fiddling, didnt even have to remove the HD!!!

Thanks again!

another lesson I learned with the "optimum settings" in the BIOS, which is just a setup that is the "optimum settings for the BIOS" but not necesseraly to your entire PC setup. I always set my BIOS manually, which works the best for my hardware installed and sometimes it could take up to hours to find the right configuration.