Mysteriously Slow Dell P4
Now, I don’t just mean in Windows, but even from boot cd’s and built in utilities. The box was brought to my attention because it was giving an unmountable boot partition error. No trouble, either the drive is toast or it needs a good chkdsking. Chkdsk solved that, and the SMART data on the drive looked fine, so back to Windows.
Churn churn churn. Up yet? No? Ok. Play with my phone… stare at people… Up now? No? And so on. Eventually it opened up, this was getting into Safe Mode mind you, and just ran like a sack of broken legs.
It was slow in my bootdisc environment, but I checked for infections anyway, just to clear the path. Pretty clean. Hmmm….
Next step- yanking stuff out. First, hard drive… no change on the boot cd. Next, the other optical drive. No change. Switch CD to tray two.. ok, that one is actually broken anyway, it’s not the culprit, but it’s disconnected on GP. Ok….
Fiddle… faddle some… decide to run memtest. Everything is going… what the hell? The L1 cache is running at 37MB/s ? That isn’t right is it? L2 at 36MB/s??? Huh? Note, the clock speed was fine, at 2.39 some odd gigahertz.
Now, at this point, I only vaguely recalled what numbers I usually see there, since they normally aren’t what I’m interested in, but it nagged me because it was obviously too low.
Back into the BIOS. CPU Information… numbers look fine. What is this Mode setting? It’s in Compatibility, with a Normal option. Change it… numbers look the same. Well, maybe it doesn’t update until a reboot. Make it so!
Huh. Numbers are still the same. Let’s try memtest again, for giggles. L1 cache? over 19000 MB/s. Hot damn! Back to the house of pain, er, Windows!
Soars like an eagle!
The only thing I can find are vague indications that this was for some Windows 95 install issues, but why you’d worry about that on a later model P4 is beyond me. Why someone fiddling with the BIOS would turn it on also is beyond me, though I fear it’s just the default setting.