Dual Booting is making my computer slow: HELP

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Dizzy714

New Member
I should probably start off with my basic specs.
Intel Core i7 920
6Gb's DDR3
640 HDD
Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit.

Alright, I just bought a 1.5 TB SATA HDD because I thought to myself in the long run it'll be worth it [I've used about 300Gb's on the 640 drive, which is the drive that came stock with the Dell system I bought]. I installed it just fine, and switched the SATA cables to run the 1.5TB drive in the 0 slot, and bumped the 640 drive down to the 1 slot. Booted up the 1.5 and loaded Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, and that's all I've done so far - so I've been hitting F12 to boot up to the Vista drive over the past week. Well, it's significantly slower - overall performance just seems sluggish compared to how it used to run [it used to run perfectly smooth]. Quick example: Under the 'Pictures' folder I probably have 1.5Gb's full of pictures - now before it would take about a second for a picture to pull up [since there was so many in that specific folder], any other folder with just a few hundred pictures or so would pull up instantly, now pulling up a picture in that same big Pictures folder it takes about 5 seconds minimum to pull up. So I'm wondering if I did anything wrong and why this drive is running much slower than it used to be. In desperation for help, thanks in advance.
 
I was going to mention that. I did a defrag the day after I installed the new drive, it took over 6 hours to complete but that seemed to change nothing in performance.
 
No, I had no need to - yet atleast. I haven't began using my 1.5TB drive with Windows 7. I'm just using Vista on the 640GB drive at the moment, like I always have - I didn't do anything to this drive, it's the exact same as before except that the SATA cable is bumped down a slow and it's not the primary boot up - so I hit F12 and select it to boot it up. But like I said, it's running sluggish compared to how it used to run.
 
Because initially it wasn't reading the other drive, which was a simple stupid mistake [SATA cable was reversed], so I swapped the order to see if that would work - then finally kept that order and flipped around the SATA cable and woala, everything was fine.

And I honestly don't know, I just called Dell and they couldn't even give me my motherboards model. I do know that it's part of the Intel X58 family, though. Computer I have is a Dell Studio XPS 435MT, incase anybody would be able to figure that out for me.
 
The basics (quick and dirty version) of a boot strap on a PC

Power on

POST

BIOS looks for bootable materials

BIOS turns boot process over to hard drive

OS Starts

Log in Window


Now, in some BIOS you can actually set a specific HD boot order, and if you switched your drives around and it goes to that first drive and there is no bootable material it probably then starts to search automatically for other bootable materials. Which could be a possible reason why your boot time increased.

I know in my rig, my HD failed about a month or a bit more ago. I went down to the local computer store and just bought a 1TB SATA drive to replace it. Installed it, loaded windows on it, but it kept failing to boot and it took me about 5 minutes to figure out that in my BIOS, there is a HD boot order, and since I have multiple drives it automatically promoted my data drive to the top of the list. Well, when my BIOS tried to boot my data drive and could not find any OS to go with, it just hung. So, I changed the boot order of the drives to ensure my new drive booted before any other hard drive.

This is in addition to the actual boot order, which consists of CD/DVD, Network (PXE), and of course hard disks.
 
That's not my problem, my boot time is fine - and I've switched around the order of boots to my liking. Initial boot goes right to the new drive with Windows 7 on it. F12/boot options takes me to a screen where I get to select what drive I would like to boot on, which I've been doing, so I choose my old drive with Vista on it. Now the boot up is fine, but overall performance on that drive isn't as smooth and quick on it anymore - and that's what is not making any sense to me. Before I installed the new drive, the old drive ran perfectly smooth and quick - now for some odd reason, I have two drives in my computer, boot my old one up and it doesn't run as good.
 
Okay, still having this same problem but I've noticed something - I need to know if this is correct or not.

I hit properties on the drives an went to the hardware tab, and that shows you were the pieces are located. Well they both say they're located on 'Location 0', but the new drive is on channel 0 whereas the old drive is on channel 1. To me it sounds like they should be in different 'locations' - like the DVD drive is in 'Location 1'.

2vnng9f.jpg


19xuua.jpg


Is this correct, or wrong?
 
The different channel same location sounds fine to me. SATA has different channels for each drive but each drive is on location 0 for that channel.
 
Have you done the usual "pull everything out until it works" technique yet? If it started slowing when you put in the new 1.5tb drive, unplug the sata cable and see if vista burts back into it's fun and happy self.
 
PunterCam said:
Have you done the usual "pull everything out until it works" technique yet? If it started slowing when you put in the new 1.5tb drive, unplug the sata cable and see if vista burts back into it's fun and happy self.
Click to expand...

That's what I just did last night, and it's running just like the 1.5tb drive is still in - so something about installing that drive somehow messed things up. I also unchecked disk caching to see if that would make a difference and it didn't. Another problem I've been having is that ever since I installed that new drive, recorded vocals were coming out hollow and metallic sounding rather than deep and heavy.

Somebody said that I should check the IRQ numbers and make sure that nothing is important is sharing the same number - well I checked and there's a bunch of stuff sharing the same number.

4r9q4h.jpg
 
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