Slow hard drive on new Mesh PC

Hi,

I'm new to this forum, but you were seriously recommended by friends - the site looks almost too good to be true, but here's hoping!

I bought a new PC from Mesh last week, and I'm really disappointed with its general performance. I'm not a techie, so I'm not sure exactly what's causing the problem, but I'll have a go at describing the symptoms. First, here's the build:

BIOS American Megatrends Inc.
CDRW/DVD/CDROM SONY DVD RW AW-G170A
Chipset Intel(R) 82801 PCI Bridge - 244E
CPU Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz 1866 MHz Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6300 @ 1.86GHz 1866 MHz
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Hard Drive WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 250GB serial ATA 16mb buffer
Memory 1024MB DDR2 533MHZ (2x512MB)
Motherboard ASUSTeK P5B-TMX PCI Express
Modem BT Voyager 105 ADSL Modem
Network Card PlayLinc Adapter Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC Operating System 5.1.2600.1 Windows XP Media Center Edition
Sound Card Realtek High Definition Audio (onboard)

Since setting up my PC last week from new, I've been very disappointed with its ability to perform certain tasks. The first game that I bought for the PC was 'Dark Messiah', which is admittedly a fairly demanding game, however even at its lowest graphical settings the PC is unable to play properly, and stalls / crashes frequently. And it takes 20 minutes to load and then a further 15 to load each level. In fact there is no discernable difference between performance at the lowest settings and the highest, which leads me to believe it's not a graphics problem but possibly a hard drive access problem, as this flashes permanently whenever it's having problems. I've noticed that almost every task that involves significant writing to the hard drive is taking a lot longer than I would expect. Installing small programs can sometimes take half an hour or more. For example installing the 'auto assault' demo from PC Gamer 166 took over half an hour.

I've updated the graphics card driver, but it made no difference.

Am I just expecting too much from this PC? I know i's not high-end, but I thought it might be good enough to play on for a year or two...

Hope I've given you enough information to suggest some help, and if not, by all means ask me to clarify.

Many thanks in advance

 

Your problem and ahve to do with the actual processor speed of the machine. I reallize you have a dual core processor but if the game looks at direclty at your Ghz this may cause an issue, to that end I can't varify but the game is recommending a 2.5 Ghz processor 3.2 recommnded but the rest of your system should be more that enough to run it. Hope that helps

The Slack Man

 

Hi Slack Man - thanks for the post

So are you saying basically the just processor isn't powerful enough? I thought processors weren't so much about the clock speed any more and more about the architecture. Either way I thought the duo cores meant it's basically twice the 1.86 GHz, i.e. about 3.7Ghz?

I bought it based on Computer Shopper's December processor reviews where it got a best buy and scored better than a Pentium D 3.2Ghz.

Also it's things like installing games and loading that seem to cause the biggest difficulty rather than playing them.

 

From what I understand about dual core tech it is more efficient when your using multiple appilications not necessarly gaming. While you are correct about it may perform at higher level. But through put is through put. Allot of processor have a lower speed rating but out perform faster processors over all depending on the application, but if the game is having an issue with the processor itself for reasons of its clock speed or otherwise. Your system by stats is quite beefy, however thats not always what you expect. Some acrchtectures are designed for graphics some for multiple applcation (witch MS Vista should love) but that may not be your issue it may be something else but you can goto the website and see if you cen find info on your problem.

 

Welcome to the real world of duo-core.
2 x 1.86 Ghz usually means 1 x 1.86Ghz in most programs, unfortunately.
Real world tests are much more reliable than PC mag tests, but it is an expensive way to find out. I know from bitter experience.

Until software is written to use duo-cores they will continue to use one core only, IMHO.

MS has a hotfix (Article 896256) for multiple processors. I have applied it to my Toshiba Tecra A7 duo-core laptop. It didn't appear to make any difference in performance, though. Bazza

===

 

Oddly enough I also have performance problems on a 250GB hdd purchased in a pre-built system from Mesh. I am busy copying the data off this at the moment (taking loooong) so I can reformat and hopefully rectify the problem. Will report back here tomorrow.

Firstly though, to determine that it is your HDD (or CPU) that is the bottleneck, do the following:

1) Start -> Run -> perfmon.exe

On XP, the default counters will be fine if you have only one HDD.

2) Right click the graph and on the General tab, change the "Sample Automatically every ? " seconds value to 3 seconds.

3) Start your game

Once it gets going, Alt-Tab back to Performance Monitor.

The scale on the avg disk queue length counter will be 100. That's because this counter should (under normal use) be below 1.0.

What I'm seeing while reading files off my disk (while copying), is that the CPU is going to 50% and the disk queue length is over 1.0. This is not the case when copying the same files fomr another of the same HDDs in my system - especially the CPU utilisation which hardly goes above idle.

BTW, the files on the troubled HDD are not NTFS compressed. If they were, then the CPU would be needed to uncompress the files on the fly before writing to the target disk. MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THIS TOO!

Let us know your findings.

 

And for comparison sake, I run BF2/2142 with all graphics settings at their maximum. My system: Intel D950 3.6 GHz, 2 x 1GB RAM, NVidia 9700 GTX graphics, OS: XP MCE.

 

Cheers Dan,

that application proves it - it's permanently on 100% whille the processor's dawdling along at 30%. And it just took an hour to install Half Life.

I mailed Mesh to complain, and I was quite srprised to get a response saying they'd had lots of problems with this drive and they're offering to replace it.

Only trouble is I guess they're going to want to pick up the PC and take it with them for a while, which I'd rather do without!

thanks for your help and hope your drive sorts itself out!