Before few days I got some weird hangings on my mech. Symptoms are that windows starts about 4 times slower, mouse pointer is hanging as I move it over the screen (and almost nothing is being runned at the time), the same most of times when I scroll web page in FF and if I open a PDF while listening music from winamp, music get stopped for a moment, the same if I try to compile something - all CPU gets consumed by the compiler, which was a minor run before... in total, something went very wrong, resulting this mech being much much much less capable of anything than it was.

I consider to replace pasta on my CPU but since the CPU temperature isn't greater than it was, I wonder whether this will fix anything. The next consideration is Windows reinstall.

I have only essential applications in startup and even some of services are shut down. No new software installed lately. HDD defragmented the last week. I observed processes with processexplorer but no foreign processes so far.

Any ideas?

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Newest entry. While doing backups, I saw one more symptom, that is probably most close to the truth. Mech was unable to burn a CD without several read buffer underruns on (16x), which is just ridiculous as it was able to burn without having read buffer fall for a single percent before. Will look if DMA is activated when I finish this burn.

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Strangely, everything works in PIO mode, although it worked in DMA before. I am able only to tell it to use "DMA if available", but it uses PIO. I do not see way to force it do otherwise. File system is NTFS and the disk is less than 40% full.

Any suggestions?

The crap did self-fix after I removed the problematic device, initiating its re-install.

So you physically removed the HD from the machine and your slowdowns went away? Sounds like you're either having massive problems with that specific drive, or the IDE controller that interfaces with the drive may be going out. Or it could be something stupid with the IDE cable.

If it still misbehaves after you wipe the drive, I'd recommend swapping out IDE cables. If that doesn't help, maybe look for another HD to test with. If it's the IDE controller, basically you'll need a new mobo.

Thanks for the input Sat (as I might need that some other time), but this time it was a little bit simpler. Under "removed the problematic device" I meant just the driver for primary IDE. See the image.

That initiated its reinstall on startup, which fixed everything.

So yeah, from some reason just the drivers got stuck in PIO, refusing to use DMA. I don't remember doing anything special to cause the problem, except having problems with a non-resurrectable rw CD (just the disc, not the drive).

huh, that's odd. Means your motherboard drivers somehow got jacked up. You may want to think about removing the whole lot and reinstalling them. Then again, if it's working ok now, you may not want to bother.

On an older box of mine, every time I installed a new game it would screw up my graphics drivers. Beats me how. I guess this is along that same line. Anyway, good job isolating it.

Whatever it has been, the problem was flushed out in few minutes. Really not feeling like torturing any hardware before it gives me a good reason for it.