Man, I'd shell out the $$$s for a new drive. Pricewatch is showing them for right around 100 bucks (for a 250 gig drive). Seems like 250 is the sweet spot in the gigs/dollar curve at the momment. Just my $0.02.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

Roland - a search of the forum should have provided lots of info about HD tuning and speed requirements. Basically it's not speed that's the issue with modern drives but latency. Without DMA support you will have latency issues. Can you enable DMA for the drive or is it so old that it won't do that reliably? Have you tried? (You didn't say anything either way) That's a pretty slow drive but it should have enough bandwidth if you can avoid latency problems. Also enabling the "extra buffering" options in the setup will help.

Hmm. The Load of 1.30 and the non-standard RAM size make me think the following:

1. You are using onboard video, and that video chip uses "shared RAM", which means you are using a low-end video card.

2. That, plus the load value of 1.30 (overtaxed) means it is very likely you're using non-accelerated X output, which will always be choppy.

Try adding an AGP video card: the suggested route is an FX5200 (fanless).

-brendan

What he said. The Apollo "Bloody Monster" is popular, fanless (and thus quiet) and quite reasonably priced: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814140017

I will give kudos to Roland for putting the load average and memory size output in the post, even if it turned out to be an unintentional (on his part) thread hijack, since the source of the problem isn't likely disk related.

-brendan