At this point you may want to find a friend with a spar hard drive and connect it to your computer and see if the BIOS detects it or not.
I dont have any spare hard drives at hand at the moment, but like I said before, I can leave it with the company tomorrow again, and I will give them very specific instructions on what I expect to see working when I pick it up. Obviously the concept 'fixed' was too vague for them. I can test it there next time I pick it up and they will install windows on it to prove that. They wont get another opportinuty to say it works when it clearly doesnt.
Well now, Ive had my computer back since monday and Ive installed the drivers and the first few programs. Nothing changed since I left it there the first time... There were no updates to be installed at start-up and no installations to continue or be completed, so it's as fast as it'll ever be. But still, it took over 5 minutes to boot, start windows and start MSN, Firefox and 1 game. Since its obviously still slower than my old computer (which could do the exact same in about a minute), Im not very pleased with what the shop did. Its rather unlikely a computer of over 5 years old can beat a rig like this :S The booting time is good. The Windows logo showing that windows is loading isnt as fast as speeds Im used to, but its not bad either. The real length lies in the time it take to show the desktop until the moment the applications start up, which takes several minutes. Would anybody have any idea what could be done? As you can imagine, Im not very happy with the long waiting line I had last time without results, and they said they checked everything, concluding that the HDD wouldve been the only problem. So theres no reason to assume they will see something wrong if I take it back there. Obviously, Im not very thrilled to take that path again. Thanks in advance for any replies.
Holy crap you should disable some of those, WLM, MS Office, Adobe, CCC, AVG.... No wonder your desktop takes so long to appear. You can set them to delayed startup in the "services" menu..(My Computer/Manage) What about the MS Services like Computer browser - are they all enabled?
The desktop itself doesnt take long to appear. But when the desktop appears and the applications load (both manually and automatically), it takes several minutes. Besides, I never touched the settings of what loads at startup at my old computer, so this cant be the real source of the problem.
Yes, they did. However, they didn't install Windows to test it, because I didn't buy it with them. They also said they couldn't install it because they install via a network, not with a disc. Along with that network installation would come an activation and stuff automatically, which is why they couldn't give away a free license. Or at least that's what I could make out of it. So unless I had the installation disc with me (which I obviously didn't), they couldn't even see it get any further than the boot screen. The only tests they said they performed were tests on the hardware individually, which they said worked properly except for the HDD, which is now replaced.
Imo they sound a little bit stupid, because they could have simply cloned the drive. No need to install anything...
I don't know the details of drive cloning, but they said they couldn't install windows. And if I would've told them that, they would most likely say they don't do stuff like that. Still, they claimed to have checked everything and only the HDD came out faulty. So if I would return it again, they would probably say there's nothing more to fix, unless I ask them to replace every part in there. In that case, I think I can expect another 2-3 weeks of waiting time.
^Cloning is a standard procedure employed by any PC repair shop in the world.....it takes one HDD and creates an exact replica of it on another drive. Anyway, the HDD was really the only hardware that could be faulty...if it's been replaced then the rest is up to you as far as optimizing your system. You should start by checking wat apps and services are loading at with Windows...
I reduced the applications that start at startup to 6: Realtek HD Audio Manager, Microsoft IntelliPoint, WLM, Driver Genius Task Scheduler, Adobe Reader and Acrobat Manager and PowerReg. Its slightly faster, but it still takes 4 minutes for the same applications to run after startup.
Turned that 1 off as well to see if it would have a lot of influence. Guess not, or at least not enough.
Here's a pic I took of firefox from a little while back... http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5265/5656337084_8ca585a3b0_b.jpg I've had it go to 3+ gigs and finally die because it exceeded its 32 bit program memory space. Not because of leaks though (no meaningful ones at least, everything leaks, basically), just because I never close a tab that I know I'll return to later. After a few months of uptime, the tabs add up. I also run multiple games at the same time. Right now my PC at home is running (minimized) starcraft2, mass effect, bfbc2. I just tab to them when I want to play. All run smoothly, with no issues. Whatever is minimized doesn't interfere with the foreground stuff. I don't know about crysis2 though... I've never multitasked that one. Some games HATE being multi-tasked with other games, others are just fine with sharing. -scheherazade
Wow... Those are a LOT of tabs in firefox :S What you just said, I could do on my old rig as well, but now I can't do anything near that before everything starts lagging. Even just browsing through folders is slightly slower. Its not a lot of difference, but its there.
I just built a 990fx+955 system for a family friend. You shouldn't have major issues multi-tasking, it's very peppy. Your long boots sound like maybe your HDD is crap, and you are running a crapton too many background processes. On a fresh boot, with windows 7, you should have [Total all users + all system] about 40-ish processes (maybe less if you care to clean up). With XP, it should be in the mid to low teens. If you're not doing anything, your PC shouldn't be doing anything. It's just crap that hogs scheduler time slices, and slows down responsiveness - even if it's not using much cpu. You could use 8 gigs of ram, considering how you use your system (running out of memory with 4). Note : 8 gigs of 1333 ddr3 will set you back maybe $60 bucks. You already have 4, so you only need to buy another 4... although I didn't see how many ram slots you have occupied already. Performance issues with games, while multitasking games, could very well be video driver issues. TBH I've had way more problems multitasking games with ATI than with nvidia. (WAY more.) Tabbing between full-screen opengl or D3D games with nvidia, has been seamless (both with my 8800 gtx sli, and 570 sli). Some games I tab in/out of with nvidia would take seconds to tab in/out of with my old 5970 (even if running in single card mode), and I wasn't guaranteed to be able to tab back in/out without hanging the game. Sometimes when I'd tab out and in, the video performance was shot to hell, and I just had to save and restart the game. Even back in the day with my 9700 pro, full screen tabbing was harder than with my GF3/4 or 8800's. (I can't say if the GF2ultra, GF, riva128, etc, had tabbing issues. 1) I can't remember those details that far back, 2) multitasking was less common. But I remember the old firegl was sweeeeet. (Actually, ELSA had some sick GL cards back then...)) I love ATI when it comes to bang for the buck. Good, fast cards. But ATI drivers make baby pandas cry. -scheherazade
HDD autodetection is a real short process and should take about 2 seconds in the worst case and not producing any noise at all. Anything taking more time than that is implying problems related to the HDD, controller or cable. As long as you have set your SATA controller to AHCI or RAID the HDD will not show in the Standard CMOS Settings page. Only IDE drives or SATA IDE emulated drives will show there. In your case i would first try reset your BIOS. Pull the power cable. Take out the battery for about 30 minutes or if you cannot reach it short the CLEAR CMOS jumper with a screwdriver for at least 10 to 15 seconds. After that load the CMOS optimised defaults in BIOS on the main BIOS page, save and exit. If that not helps next thing you could try is another (NEW) SATA cable -> no go -> another SATA port on the mainboard -> no go -> take the computer back to the store and kick their butts that they repair the issue -> no go -> get your money back. Anything else would be a waste of time on a brand new machine which does not work.
