AAO110 > Tosh HDD = slloowwww. Help!

Hi, guys.

I bought an AAP110 on eBay cheapish as it has a cracked screen. I wanted to try out the SSD with XP to see what it was like. The SSD seemed fine with Linpus but was excruciatingly slow with XP, even after following most of the tweaks in the forums here. I've now pulled out the SSD and installed a Toshiba MK3008GAL 30GB HDD. No problems with the installation (BIOS detected it perfectly), formatted fine, XP went on perfectly, but this thing's slow! OK, it's better than the SSD, but the mouse pointer often freezes briefly even well after boot up, and it's incapable of playing even basic music videos - it's too choppy, and the sound is always crackly.

I've had the problem with HHCTRL.OCX, and will try getting the missing file off my AAO150, but why is my AAO110/Tosh HDD so slow compared to my AAO150/HDD wih the same type of XP install? My AAO150 has the original HDD, and it flies - it really is fast, and with only 512MB of RAM. Is the Tosh HDD just really slow? Is it the missing HHCTRL.OCX file slowing everything down? Could the extra 512MB stick of memory I put in be incompatible, though it shows up fine in the BIOS and is 533MHz rather than 667MHz? I had a look in the BIOS to check the HDD is set to run in UDMA 6 mode (or whatever the setting should be) and couldn't find such a setting in the BIOS).

Any help much appreciated.

Cheers, Jon.

 

Have you checked the current transfer rate of the Toshiba with some software like ATTO or HD Tune? What scores can you get out of those read/write tests? An odd result far from the normal value may indicate some connection problem or mismatched operating mode.

 

Something's wrong with your machine. Zif cable, hdd or xp.
I have a AAO110 with a MK3008GAL and WinXP. It's really smooth. No freezing or slowdowns at all

 

Try Rons tinyXP. I have it on my SSD AAO and it flies. As fast as Linpus IMO.

 

Re: AAO110 > Tosh HDD = sorted now

I had a poke around on the net, not having found an answer to my problems on the aspireoneuser forums. Turns out something was going wrong with my installs for some reason, despite the fact that the same sort of set up worked perfectly on my other AAO, a 150. When I checked the IDE/PATA controller in the Device Manager, it turned out the Toshiba 1.8in HDD was working in PIO mode, which is astonishingly slow. I couldn't reset it to DMA mode, either in Device Manager or in the registry, where some of the entries relating to the HDD were missing.

I used nLite to integrate SP3 (rather than SP2) into my XP install, re-installed it, and bingo - the HDD now works perfectly. It's still not as fast as my 150 with the SATA HDD, but it's still very usable with the full XP SP3 install.

Cheers, Jon.