Wayfarers of Veeshan

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Drexxell , 71st GNecrOMancEr -- Wielder of ()
Druul , 60th Troll Shaman () + Wielder of and
Driss, 51st Dwarf Priestess of Brell Serilis
Dralia, 36th Erudite Enchantress

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Trapped in Veeshan. Send food.

Was the drive a new one? Or was it an old one that is being recycled and used for your machine? It could have already seen a ton of use and so it's just a sluggish drive. Is the lag only during reboot or are your read/write times slower in everything you do?

Also, was the drive that was swapped out just a data drive, or did it have your OS on it? If so, there could be some system settings on the new OS which are causing a longer boot.

Then again, it IS windows afterall...

Funny you should ask this, cus I had the EXACT same thing happen. The problem is with your registry. What I would do -- and I know its painful, but I would suggest two things:

1/ Use Partition Magic to create 2 or more logical drives, with your windows partition maybe 4 gig, then a "data" drive either the rest or split it into one or more drives.

2/ This is the painful part. RE-INSTALL Windows. And many of the apps that tie into Windows will also need to be re-intalled. Why? Because the registry is bloated and most likely corrupted. I has the exact same problem and a fresh Windows install took care of the problem. This is basically a sound strategy for most Windows OS, at least up to 2000/XP.
Trying to clean or fix the registry might also be an option, but in my experience you are better off in the long run to just to a fresh install.

3/ Do a disk defrag.

4/ As others have said, back up your data files (anything you MUST have), and reformat the hard drive, then do step 1,2

Hope this helps,
Chanzia

Following Chanzias post ... there is a way to restore an older copy of the registry, but it's full of ancient technical support secrets and confounding wisdom of the ages.

First Way of the Restore
1 - Start your computer, press and hold CTRL, and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Windows 98 Startup menu. If you are running Windows Me, start your computer with the startup disk.
2 - At the MS-DOS prompt, type cd\windows\command, and then press ENTER. Where windows is the name of the folder in which Windows is installed.
3 - At the C: prompt, type scanreg /restore, and then press ENTER.
4 - Select the previous registry you want to restore, and then press ENTER. NOTE: A properly working registry has the word "Started" next to the date.

If necessary, I may be able to reveal the mystical Second Way of the Restore if the first does not work.

I've got another one for you. The 60 gig drive might be slower than the 20 gig, by a huge margin.

Hard drives are connected to your computer via the IDE (Integraged Drive Electronics) bus. Currently there are 4 bus speeds in common use: ATA33, ATA66, UltraATA100, and UltraATA133. The higher the number the faster the bus. Busses are backwards compatible, meaning you can hook a 33 drive up to a 133 bus and it will function.

Drives are rated the same way. The oldest drives were 33's, the newest are 133.

Odds are if your motherboard is 2 or 3 years old it has a 100 IDE bus... some off-the-shelf systems still only come with a 66 though. But if your ATA100 drive was replaced with a 66 (or god forbid a 33) you'd see a significant decrease in performance.

Here's a tech tip for you upgraders. RAID. I run two fast (7200rpm) ATA100 drives in a RAID 0 array, meaning data is written first to one, then to the other, back and forth. Reduces the amount of data waiting to be read/written by using two busses instead of one. The combined drives, 30 gig each, act as one extremely fast 60 gig drive!

That speed could be increased further by the use of an ATA133 controller and better drives.

And it DOES make a difference in EQ, where large amounts of data are continually swapped back and forth between hard drive and memory. Now I just have to steal Kai's CPU when she's not looking....

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Epic Lord Protector of Marr
Knight of Truth
Steel Warrior
Ranger of Seru


Slightly Waterlogged Wizard

A few things...

The 60 Gb drive was brand new.
The 20 Gb drive was partitioned into C, D and E. That mapping was followed, in the same % breakdowns, when copying to the 60Gb drive.
The drive was my only hard drive and contained the OS (on the C partition).

The whole thing was done as a favor, because when I asked the sys admin guy how hard/easy it was, I got "It's simple...I can do it in a half hour for you" answer. He did it once, and tried changing the % breakdown and the whole system freaked out, crashing, etc...so I took it back, he did it again with the identical % breakdown. Now, it works fine EXCEPT for the totally slow re-boot. I hate the idea of "you broke it, you fix it" when it's just a favor, but I'm pretty pi$$ed because I'm a total novice on stuff like this and when he said it was so "easy" I took it at face value.

I'm going to print out all the ideas you guys have posted and ask him to try them, cuz my track record with fixing my computer myself is poor.

Thank you for the ideas...I'll let you know how it goes.

Drex

P.S. This whole thing was supposed to be a quickie-fix so I could load LDoN until I bought a new computer, some 1-2 months from now, but it's like a nightmare anymore...grrr..."Simple", indeed!

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Drexxell , 71st GNecrOMancEr -- Wielder of ()
Druul , 60th Troll Shaman () + Wielder of and
Driss, 51st Dwarf Priestess of Brell Serilis
Dralia, 36th Erudite Enchantress