Computer freezing horrible

hello, i have a dell optiplex gx270 the hard drive went bad and had to have another installed i put a 320gb western digital sata and had to use the adapter to make it convert to 40 pin connector on mother board. it has 512mb memory 1 stick of ddr2300 and 1 stick of ddrpc2100 it has a intel pentium 4 processor 3.20ghz,intel 82865g graphics, it freezes constantly no matter what you do im in safe mode with networking right now because it freezes to bad to get on in normal mode any help would be appreciated.

 

oh yeah im running win xp home with sp2

 

First, where did you get the "new" hard drive?

Have you run any type of hardware diagnostics for the memory, motherboard, etc.?

You don't have an antique, but that baby is getting up there in age.

 

All 3 of my machines are as old or older than this one with no freeze problems.
Sounds more like something (AVscan or something) running in the background and running the CPU cycles to the limit.

 

Yes, we will need to know what she is running in the background.

What are your ant-virus, and spyware programs?

How clean (dust and lint free) is the PC?

It would be kind of hard to go to SP3 at the moment.

I usually run Windows Defender, and AVG free for my less than fiscally capable clients.

I just really want to make sure that HDD is brand new, and has an 80 conductor cable attached to it, and the adapter.

 

yes the computer is dust and lint free, the adapter is a ide to sata serial ata converter/adapter for host/drive you plug the adapter into the 40 pin slot on the mother board then plug a sata data cable into the adapter and to the back of the hd yes it is a new hd off ebay i believe that avg is the only software i have installed. it did not do any of this till i put the new hd in.

 

Now, when you got it from eBay, did it come in all the original packaging?

 

yes it was sealed i dont know what has happened to it

 

Is SATA enabled in the BIOS?

 

i dont know i only have that hd installed on here

 

Now, this is starting to get into an odd realm.

In the BIOS settings, would it have to be set to SATA, even though it is connected via 40 pin EIDE?

You are going to have to go into the BIOS setup menu, usually F1, or F2 at startup, and see about PATA, and SATA settings.

I don't know how much of an issue this being a SATA, adapted to EIDE.

I don't think that Optiplex even has a setting for SATA, if I remember my Dell BIOS correctly.

Shouldn't it recognize it as EIDE?

 

i couldnt find anything in bios about satawould more memory fix it since i put a really big hd in it there was only a 20mb before

 

in my device manager there is a ? mark on sm bus controller dont know if this helps but thought it might

 

Could you be a bit more specific about that ? mark?

Check under IDE/ATA ATAPI controllers for any question marks.

Try right clicking on the ? item, and attempt to update the driver.

Did an install disc come with the HDD (probably not), and what version of Windows are you running?

That is, what service pack?

 

bamagirl485 told us in post 2, XP Home with SP2

More important, I think, is which Service Pack was on the CD that you installed XP onto this drive? Data loss may be imminent if the installation CD had no service pack

For the SM Bus controller, I think installing the INF update from Intel (or the older chipset drivers from Dell) will allow XP to install this correctly?

Using a SATA adapter, the motherboard and Windows should treat the drive as an IDE but I don't know how well these adapters would perform, a PCI adapter would be better, providing the BIOS is able to boot to add-in cards.

On checking the Dell site, I see that the GX270 does have SATA connectors ... :confused

 

i went and installed the intel inf driver that fixed the sm bus controller would it help if i reinstalled the operating system or changed to vista?
the win xp didnt have any service packs on it